Self-sustaining planetary cities: experimentations between technology and proximity towards commons-based human settlements fit for extreme conditions

The widespread impact on human lives of the COVID-19 pandemic made emerge probably for the first time in the public conscience a new trend that will increasingly be relevant for legal, political, and economic sciences: the convergence of and interplay between global and local dynamics. This phenomenon, visible also in the emergence and handling of other crisis factors like climate change, wars, droughts, famines, natural disasters, and biodiversity loss, emphasizes the need in the future to overcome internationalist or globalist approaches for more nuanced approaches and more complex governance solutions to address issues that are “planetary” in the nature, that is to say global and local at the same time. What is the role of cities in this paradigm shift? Planetarism calls for the need to conceive cities as self-sustaining, but self-sustenance may lead to the risk of undemocratic governance. Applying the City as a Commons’ framework may help manage both the planetary crises cities will have to address, as much as the risk of authoritarianism in cities. This article investigates three urban experimentations that may suggest that self-sustenance and democratic, participatory governance are possible if we adopt a commons-based approach: energy communities, Community Land Trusts, sustainable manufacturing and green cooperatives. It finally discusses the results of this analysis and suggest that this hypothesis may be useful for the ongoing conversation on the implementation the principles embedded in the One Health and Planetary Health approaches