Recommoning Ground: Community Land Trusts and Urban Commons

Abstract

The most pressing problems facing cities are rooted in the relationship between people and commodified lands. Community Land Trusts (CLT) are models that have potential to not only address these issues, but also the urban housing affordability crisis by cultivating a more enriching and life-affirming urban fabric. CLTs decommodify land, removing it from private property regimes. In so doing, CLTs disrupt capitalist dynamics and present favorable opportunities for the emergence of urban commons. Urban commons promote the wellbeing and uplift of people and places through organization around shared resources (Kornberger and Borch, 2015; Stavrides, 2016). This thesis examines private property ownership and alternative land relations, recapitulates the history and theory of CLTs and urban commons, examines the housing affordability crisis, identifies urban typologies where a CLT-as-urban-commons model could be applied, and provides a design strategy for the cultivation of this model. It asks: can CLT models open up pathways toward more resilient urban futures? Can CLT models be a basis for urban commons? What happens when we shift our relationship with landscape from one based on exchange value to one based on the cultivation of community? I investigate these questions using methods of literature review, historical research, mapping, and speculative visioning. I draw together scholarship on alternative land tenure models, housing affordability and displacement, and the urban commons, and synthesize these theories with landscape architectural design practices. I conclude that (1) CLTs have great potential as sites of urban commons, (2) that landscape architecture has a critical role to play in the cultivation of CLTs-as-urban-commons, and (3) that urban commons have the power to transform community members’ relations with each other, with the urban environment, and with landscape itself.