Planetary Co-cities: Experimentations in Self-sufficiency and Commoning for Crisis-Resilient Human Settlements

The paper moves from the observation of ‘externally disconnected communities, internally cohesive, and interconnected as social units’, mainly emerged during the COVID-19. It explores the hypothesis of co-governance for a self-sustaining city, reflecting on solutions able to solve the tension between proximity and technology, while preserving social and technological justice and democracy. For this reason, it reviews the currently dominant urban visions of the smart and sharing city, and it advances the hypothesis that urban commoning as a concept encompassing practices and governance mechanisms fostering sharing, collaboration, cooperation and polycentrism in the city, can favour co-creation and social-digital innovations for sustainable, fair and inclusive urban development. The Co-Cities approach is applied here, but it is also deepened and analysed through three transformative urban experimentations, related to economic (energy communities), social (community land trust) and green (community farms) infrastructures. The three case studies represent self-sustaining and self-sufficient units that offer more than simple services, they are able to empower citizens in the management and ownership of critical urban assets and infrastructures. These case studies embody an approach inspired by the city as Commons theoretical framework that can become the seed for new urban governance models. The paper sets the stage to advance in the analysis of if and how co-governance arrangements can be a viable solution in times of technological, security, health and ecological crises in cities, and how it can sustain the creation of self-sufficient and self-sustaining communities. In this way, it proposes to investigate solutions to tackle future shocks that will eventually impact the vast majority of humanity which will be clustered in cities.