Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds (cont.), Part III of Law for the Commons

Posted on September 1, 2015 by David Bollier

Today's post is the third in a four-part series derived from my strategy memo, "Reinventing Law for the Commons." This excerpt continues with Part II, "Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds," with "clusters" #5 through #9. The collection of entries here are now posted on a Commons for the Law wiki hosted by the Commons Transition website.

5. Co-operative Law

There are a number of legal and organizational innovations transforming co-operatives these days, making them moreoriented to commoning and the common good than just marketplace success. However, these innovations are geographically dispersed and not necessarily widely known, even within the co-operative movement. One of the most notable new organizational forms is the multistakeholder co-operative (or “social and solidarity cooperative”), which has been rapidly proliferating in recent years. It got its start in Italy in 1963 when families in Italy joined forces with paid care workers to develop co-operatives to provide social care, healthcare and educational services. This new paradigm collectivizes and centralizes basic overhead services (administration, personnel, accounting, etc.) and in this way empowers smaller social economy ventures (similar to “omni-commons,” see section #8 below).

In a sense, multistakeholder co-ops regularize governance for co-stewardship of commons spaces and moves away from rigid bureaucratic methods that increasingly don’t work.[1] Multistakeholder co-ops now employ more than 360,000 in paid jobs, including the disabled, the formerly imprisoned and marginalized people, and more than 40,000 volunteers. Social co-operatives have spread to all regions of Italy and today number more than 14,000, making it a significant sector of the Italian economy that is neither market- nor state-based. Today there are multi-stakeholder co-operative movements in Quebec in Canada and in a wide number of countries in Europe including France, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Finland and Greece[2].

Farewell, Tisch College

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

This will be my last post as an employee of Tisch College. I still have another week of work, but as I wind down, I am starting my blogging vacation early. I won’t post again until September 8 – at which point I will be a full time PhD student at Northeastern.

It’s hard saying goodbye to a place where you’ve worked for almost eight years. I’ve seen so many others come and go, yet it seems odd to now be the one leaving. And, all loving hyperbole aside, I know they will get on with out me.

The work continues.

I am thrilled to be starting this new journey, and thrilled to be learning new ways to contribute to the work. The work of civic renewal, of improving our communities, of working together and collaboratively building the infrastructure to have everyone’s voice equally at the table.

It is important work, and the work continues.

I was more cynical eight years ago. I was skeptical of the value most people – including myself – could bring to the hard work of confronting society’s most pressing challenges. I couldn’t equally value every person’s voice and agency when I couldn’t even value my own.

Since I started at Tisch College, I have bought a house, finished a master’s degree, gotten married, seen a niece be born and watched my father die.

I have learned so much.

I have had the privilege of working with some of the smartest people I have ever met, learning not only from their work, but from their thoughtfulness in approaching the work.

I have had lunch with Elinor Ostrom, and attended lectures by the likes of Elizabeth Warren, John Gaventa, Robert Sampson, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Chris Matthews, Christiane Amanpour, and even – if you’re into that kind of thing – Antonin Scalia.

I’ve helped make some those events happen.

I have met and learned from the amazing scholars and practioners in the civic studies community – some of the most dedicated, passionate, and intelligent people I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.

I bring that community with me, even now as I enter my next adventure. My role may change, but the work –

The work continues.

Here’s to the next chapter.

Public Parks as Public Good

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I spent much of the last week in a public park with the OPENAIR Circus, an amazing community group celebrating its 30th year in Somerville.

The big top was up for four days in the corner of the public venue. And as I sat there day in and day out, I noticed something interesting –

People kept asking my permission to use the public park.

To be fair, we had all the proper permits for use of the park and, I suppose, could have kicked people off it we found it necessary.

But it the middle of the day, hours before a performance, why would I possibly feel the need to?

A few times when people asked me, I wanted to respond with – “Of course you can – it’s a public park.”

I hardly felt I had the right to deny anyone access, though I suppose it was kind of them to ask.

What was even more interesting, though, is that not everybody asked.

I almost wish I’d tracked data on who asked for permission and who did not – large groups, for example, tended to ask. Presumably because they felt they were more likely to cause a disturbance. But there was variation among smaller groups of 2-3.

Overall, I just found it interesting to note that some people felt confident in their right to be in a public park while others imagined it was my right to bar them.

Circus Week!

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ll be offline through Monday, August 3 as I take some time to work for the OPENAIR Circus. Those who are local are welcome to stop by and enjoy a show at Nunziato Park in Somerville. Suggested donation $3. Shows will take place:

Friday, July 31 | 7pm
Saturday, August 1 | 2pm and 7pm
Sunday, August 2 | 2pm

You can read more about my work with the circus here.

Gender in an Ideal World

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve had some great discussions following my post on Feminism and the Transgender Community.

The topic has stuck with me as I’ve reflected more on this simmering rift between progressive communities.

The good news, as some have pointed out, is that younger cis women tend to be more welcoming of their transgender peers than those who came of age in earlier waves of feminism. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are still plenty of feminists who actively disparage and discriminate against transgender men and women.

That doesn’t sit well with me. That doesn’t sit well with me at all. It strikes me as deeply unjust that women who would proclaim themselves as advocates for equity would discriminate so intentionally.

Not that this is a new or unique issue. There have long been tensions between the white feminist community and the feminist communities of people of color, for example. But those topics deserve their own post.

Today, I’d like to think about what gender or gender identity might look like in an ideal world. There are many tensions between feminists and transgender communities, to be sure, but I think this might be one of them.

Both groups may share a view that gender expression as its normalized now is stifling, but I wonder if there’s a subtle but important difference deeper in these views.

Imagine first a feminist utopia: people do whatever they’re interested in and are respected for whoever they are. There may be some functional differences to restrooms, but overall gender is not a “thing” that defines us.

You may even be inclined to envision this a little more radically: seeing a society where gender is not a binary, but a spectrum encompassing a rich diversity of thoughts, feelings, looks, and expressions.

Now ask yourself: would there be transgender people in such a society?

This is where we start to get into trouble. I think – and I may be entirely wrong about this – that there is a certain flavor of feminist who would be inclined to imagine that “transgender” would be obsolete in such society.

If you are truly free to express yourself regardless of your gender, how can your assigned gender be “wrong”?

There’s a reasonable logic to that argument and a certain comforting simplicity.

But it also has some disconcerting undertones. It implies that transgender people are only a temporary element of society – that “transgender” is not a real thing, but rather a response to a paternalistic paradigm.

Under this model, you may be willing to accept a transgender person as choosing to express their gender a certain way as a means of survival.

It’s not unlike accepting the person who wishes public schools were better, but still elects to send their children to private school: they have to play into the system to make the right choice for themselves, but ultimately the act is a symbol of a broken system.

But what if we were to imagine that yes, there would be transgender people in a more gender fluid society?

Suddenly, the valuation of transgender people seems to change. They aren’t just playing a broken system instead of trying to change the rules. They are genuinely trying to express themselves, express who they are in a meaningful, ineffable way.

As a cis person myself, I don’t really know what that means. But the more I talk to transgender people, the more I hear their stories of discovery and transition, the more I’m convinced that being transgender is more complex and more deeply rooted than our society’s broken gender norms.

That our existing gender system is broken certainly complicates matters – creating false ideas of what is “feminine” and what is “masculine.” But even if we were to do away with those tired tropes, I don’t think that the identity of transgender would just wash away.

Being transgender is something deeper than that, something more fundamental to a person’s being, something which we as a collective society are only beginning to understand.

On the Challenges of Social Interaction

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Years ago my sister went to an event where they did the most brilliant thing: along with a name tag, attendees selected a color to indicate their interest in social interaction.

One color meant, “I’m very social, please talk to me!” while another indicated simply, “I am having fun, but please don’t talk to me.” I believe there was a level or two in between, but it’s those extremes that stand out in my memory.

I was always a little jealous: just think how handy that color coding would be in every day life.

But here’s the thing: that event my sister attended was for her job as a social worker. The social indicators color coding was done because many of the attendees had mental illnesses which made them, supposedly, less capable than the rest of us of socializing appropriately.

I’m pretty sure that analysis isn’t accurate, though – most of us have trouble socializing appropriately.

Far too many people feel isolated because they don’t know how to find the friendships around them.

Far too many people isolate themselves because they’d rather not have to deal with the madness that is socializing with new people.

(And then there’s the creepers who just ruin it for the rest of us. Seriously, the next time a guy randomly tries to pick me up on the street I’m going to tell him he’s ruining civil society. I bet that’ll smart.)

Meeting new people is hard – especially since “please don’t talk to me” tends to be the default assumption.

But there are ways we can change that.

Several months ago I went to a gaming convention that had an “open chair” policy. That is, any time a group of people were hanging out, they were encouraged to leave an empty chair as a sign that they welcomed more people. It didn’t matter if you didn’t know any one in the group, you were welcome to take the empty chair – provided you brought another chair to welcome whoever came after you.

That was really handy.

So, here’s my proposal: let’s come up with a universal sign. Some non-creepy way of saying, “hey, I want to make friends!”

Especially at events which are supposed to be social in nature. This weekend, for example, hundreds of people will be in Davis for ArtBeat, but, I’d guess, most people will only talk to the people they already know.

Which is unfortunate because ArtBeat should be a great place for meeting new friends.

Somerville is a small, engaged community and I feel like we ought to be able to figure this out. We ought to be able to come up with some way of non-awkwardly show who’s open to talking with strangers.

So, if you’re interested in meeting new people…wear a yellow ribbon or something. I don’t know. Let’s figure it out.

Feminism and the Transgender Community

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve been deeply struck recently by the narratives I’ve heard from some feminists about transgender people. There is a disconnect, or a tension, it seems, between certain conceptions of feminism and a full embrace of transgender people.

Among many older feminists, for example, there seems to be a general confusion about transgender identities and, perhaps, a too-eager willingness to dismiss those identities.

I mention age here not to imply that older people’s idea are inherently out of date or old-fashioned – this isn’t like when everybody rolls their eyes at the kind-of-racist thing your grandparent just said.

Rather – the women I’m thinking of are deep, liberal, radical feminists. Their age is important because they fought on the front lines of sexual liberation. They’ve personally felt that glass ceiling pushing them down. They know what it’s like to be sexually harassed and discriminated against as part of institutions that didn’t even put up the appearance of condemning such behavior.

They knew the first women in their families who were allowed to vote.

These women have been leaders in the battle not only only for women’s rights and equality, but for women’s freedom of self-expression.

Being a woman, they’ve rightly argued, is no single thing. There is no perfect body type. No thing you must enjoy or activities you must hate. It’s not clothes or hair, attitude or aptitude that define femininity.

In this way, the women’s movement isn’t just about the right to be treated equally, it’s about the right to be ourselves.

This concept runs into challenges with the transgender movement which – correctly or not – is often interpreted as arguing that, for example, a transgender woman is someone who feels like a woman.

A radical feminist doesn’t know what that means.

How can someone “feel like a woman” when womanhood itself is something that eludes definition?

This approach interprets transgender men and women as people who are simply conforming to the gender binary: transgender men were assigned female at birth but were too macho to be stereotypical women. Transgender women liked princesses too much to live by their assigned gender of male.

And while I am not at all convinced that the above interpretation of transgender people is accurate, it does create tension between the two communities as feminists bemoan the reinforcement of gender norms and see people of privilege – those assigned male at birth – claim the title of womanhood.I don’t know the way out of this tension. I have no idea what it feels like to be a gender other than the one I was assigned to at birth, but I have to trust people when they tell me that’s who they are. For me, that is enough. But as a society I think we need something more.

This conflict is particularly tragic because there should be no greater allies to the transgender community than feminists. There should be no one better able to appreciate the struggle of being unable to genuinely be yourself.

In many ways, that is, we are all in the same fight – all struggling to find and be our true selves.

La Japonaise

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has recently come under fire for inviting patrons to “Channel your inner Camille Monet and try on a replica of the kimono she’s wearing in La Japonaise.”

It’s worth taking a moment to look at the image they used to promote the opportunity: A white American woman pretending to be a white French woman pretending to be Japanese. There’s a lot going on there.

After several complaints from Boston’s Asian American community, the MFA has decided to remove the dress up portion of the activity, instead inviting guests to “touch and engage with” the kimonos, but “not to try on.”

I’ve seen this story pop up on my newsfeed the last few days, but it really caught my attention with the morning news announced the change from the MFA.

The (white) news anchors said that the MFA received “a small number of complaints” from a “handful of activists.” They added that the MFA initially responded that it would continue with the demonstrations, but eventually shifted their position after the complaints “went viral.”

The news anchors expressed general confusion as to why anyone was offended by the exhibit, and appeared disheartened that the MFA had changed it’s policy in response what they saw as a small number of protestors. They called it a case of “political correctness going to far.”

That got my attention.

Now. I do appreciate a general concern about the dangers of political correctness. The last thing that serves a productive conversation about race is an atmosphere in which people feel shut down from expressing themselves – where they’d rather say nothing than run the risk of saying the wrong thing. This is the approach that led to the fallacy of a “color blind” society – as if denying our problems would make them go away.

But “political correctness gone to far” is also a conveniently safe out for people who don’t see – or don’t want to see – a problem.

Frankly, when you have a group of Asian Americans saying they find an exhibit of Kimono dress-up offensive, I think you have to stop and try to understand why they feel that way. It doesn’t matter whether you don’t find it offensive – it’s about not thoughtlessly discrediting someone with a different view from you.

Blogger Evan Smith has a great post explaining why the “be Camille Monet” activity is problematic:

The painting in question, a work from 1876, is a singular example of Orientalism, a tradition in Western art that broadly caricatures regions as disparate as North Africa and East Asia with the aim of cultivating a Romantic visual language around Western cultural imperialism. Japonisme, the particular subset of Orientalism that Monet’s canvas depicts, is a loose interpretation of Japanese culture by French aesthetes marked by ornamentation, hyper-femininity and a sense of escapism bordering on pure fantasy. In La Japonaise the artificiality of the genre is underscored by the blonde wig Camille donned when posing for the painting in order to emphasize her whiteness, contrasting her body to the Otherness of her garments and surroundings.

That’s not to say we need to dismiss the artwork all together, but neither should we celebrate the Orientalism it embodies.

The painting took place less than 30 years after Commodore Perry’s “opening of Japan.” It was a time when Europeans were fascinated by the “topsy turvey” world of Japanese culture – seen as both civilized and barbaric.

In fairness, the Japanese were equally intrigued by European culture – seen as both civilized and barbaric. And there is some great Japanese art that depicts the ape-ishness of Europeans, just as European art captured the beauty and brutality they saw in Japan.

Orientalism was an important movement in European culture, and it seems reasonable that Western society should study it, seek to understand it, and possibly even celebrate the art that came out of it.

But we shouldn’t seek to recreate it.

We should seek to appreciate and understand other cultures, not seek to appropriate them. We shouldn’t celebrate their seeming exoticism, but seek to truly understand them.

Stuyvesant Town

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I am just returning from a weekend in New York, where I spent part of my time at Stuyvesant Town, or Stuy Town as it is more colloquially known.

Stuy Town and the adjoining Peter Cooper Village are a large post-World War II development originally conceived as housing for returning veterans and their families.

Covering 80 acres, 110 buildings, and 11,250 apartments, the development is the largest apartment complex in Manhattan and feels somewhat out of place in the dense urban center. There are trees and fireflies. Water features and basketball courts.

Previously, the area had been the Gashouse District – full of large, leaking gas tanks and people whose poverty kept them from living anywhere else.

In the early 1940s, the land was taken by eminent domain – a controversial move since the land was then owned and developed by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Supporters argued that the government needed to “induce insurance companies and savings banks to enter the field of large-scale slum clearance.”

To make room for the new development, 600 buildings, containing 3,100 families, 500 stores and small factories, three churches, three schools, and two theaters were razed. The New York Times called it “the greatest and most significant mass movement of families in New York’s history.”

And the controversy didn’t end there. After law makers declined to add a nondiscrimination clause to MetLife’s contract, the company barred blacks, with the company’s president Frederick H. Ecker arguing that “negroes and whites do not mix.”

The property has changed hands since then – and updated their applicant requirements – but it remains a private property with privately controlled rules. This felt particularly weird for a development that feels very much like a small town.

The development does have a very active tenants association, but I somehow expected more than that. I wanted there to be an egalitarian governing council that would oversee decisions about improvements and moderate tenant conflicts.

Stuyvesant Town is now Manhattan’s largest, and possibly last, “bastion of affordable housing,” having itself expelled poor people for a more refined, middle class community.

And there it stands, a monument to good intentions and the deep challenges of urban planning.

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Category Archives: community

Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds (cont.), Part III of Law for the Commons

Farewell, Tisch College

Public Parks as Public Good

Circus Week!

Stuyvesant Town