Learning to Common, Commoning as Learning
The Politics and Potentials of Community Land Trusts in New York City
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i6.1763Keywords:
commoning, learning, community land trusts, contradictions;, Cultural-Historical Activity TheoryAbstract
Through a study of a coalition to promote community land trusts in New York City, this article asks how collective learning unfolds in the context of activism against gentrification and displacement. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we illustrate how the coalition develops as it confronts the contradictory nature of commodified land and housing and navigates the contradictions and other challenges entailed in the process of commoning. Understanding this as a learning process is critical to understanding the politics of urban commoning practice and of particular approaches to it such as community land trusts (CLTs).
References
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Angotti, T. (2007). Community land trusts and low-income, multifamily housing: the case of Cooper Square. Working Paper. Lincoln Institute for Land Policy. http://infostation1.net/anthony/community%20land%20trust.pdf
Ansanelli, S., Feiger, L., Harrison, P., Hoogkamer, L., McIver, M., Shedletsky, J., Tian, B., and Q. Wu (2012). Community land trusts in New York City. Studio report, Department of Urban Planning, Columbia University, advised by Peter Marcuse and Jeffrey Lowe. New York: NEDAP.
Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (2015). Real affordability: an evaluation of Bloomberg’s housing program and recommendations to strengthen affordable housing policy. Report. New York. http://www.anhd.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Real-Affordability-Evaluation-of-the-Bloomberg-Housing-Program2.pdf
Barker, C. (2014). Expansive learning under fire. Talk given to the Center for Research on Activity, Development, and Learning (CRADLE), University of Helsinki, April 24. Online at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bz3wUg3e6r_4Zjh1a0x1NUg0VVU/edit (accessed 5 March, 2019).
Bratt, R, Stone, M. and C. Hartman, eds. (2006) A right to housing: Foundation for a new social agenda. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s talk. New York: Norton.
Bunce, S. (2016). Pursuing urban commons: Politics and alliances in community land trust activism in East London. Antipode, 48(1), pp. 134-150.
Caffentzis G. and Federici S. (2014) Commons against and beyond capitalism. Community Development Journal 49(s1), pp. i92–i105.
Cahill, C. (2007). Repositioning ethical commitments: Participatory action research as a relational praxis of social change. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 6(3), pp. 360-373.
Casper-Futterman, E. (2016). Overcoming the “Scalar stalemate” in community development. Metropolitics.
Choi, M., Van Zandt, S., & Matarrita-Cascante, D. (2018). Can community land trusts slow gentrification? Journal of Urban Affairs, 40(3), pp. 394-411.
Coalition for the Homeless (2017) The catastrophe of homelessness: facts about homelessness. Website. http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/the-catastrophe-of-homelessness/facts-about-homelessness/
Collins, C. (2011). Reflections on CHAT and Freire's Participatory Action Research from the west of Scotland: “Praxis,” Politics, and the “Struggle for Meaningful Life.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 18 (2), pp. 98-114.
Davis, J.E. (2010). The community land trust reader. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
DeFilippis, J. (2004). Unmaking Goliath: community control in the face of global capital. New York: Routledge.
DeFilippis, J., Williams, O.R., Pierce, J., Martin, D., Kruger, R., and A.H. Esfahani (2019). On the transformative potential of community land trusts in the United States. Antipode (online advance publication), pp. 1-23.
DeRienzo, H. (1994). Managing the crisis. City Limits (December).
De Smet, B. (2015). A dialectical pedagogy of revolt. Leiden: Brill.
Engels, F. (1872). The Housing Question. Online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/
Engelsman, U., Rowe, M., and Southern, A. (2016). Community land trusts: A radical or reformist response to The Housing Question today? Acme: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 15 (3), pp. 589-615.
Engelsman, U., Rowe, M., & Southern, A. (2018). Community land trusts, affordable housing and community organising in low-income neighbourhoods. International Journal of Housing Policy, 18(1), pp. 103-123.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: an Activity-Theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.
Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive learning at work: toward an activity-theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work 14 (1): pp. 133-156.
Fields, D. (2015). Contesting the financialization of urban space: community-based organizations and the struggle to preserve affordable rental housing in New York City.” Journal of Urban Affairs.
Fullilove, M.T. (2009). Root shock: how tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it. New York: Random House.
George, H. (1884). Progress and poverty: An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions, and of increase of want with increase of wealth, the remedy. W. Reeves.
Gray, K. A., & Galande, M. (2011). Keeping “community” in a community land trust. Social Work Research, 35(4), pp. 241-248.
Hart, G. (2004). Geography and development: critical ethnographies. Progress in Human Geography, 28(1), pp. 91-100.
Harvey, D. (2003). The right to the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27 (4), pp. 939-941.
Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities. New York: Verso.
Hodkinson, S. (2012). The return of the housing question. Ephemera 12 (4), pp. 423-444.
Holland, D., & Garcia Correal, D. (2013). Assessing the transformative significance of movements & activism: lessons from a postcapitalist politics. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 14(2), pp. 130-159.
Huron, A. (2018). Carving out the commons: tenant organizing and housing cooperatives in Washington, DC. Minneaopolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Katz, C. (1996). Towards minor theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14(4), pp. 487-499.
Katz, C. (2001). On the grounds of globalization: a topography for feminist political engagement. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(4), pp. 1213-1234.
Kontinen, T. (2013). A Gramscian perspective on developmental work research: contradictions, power and the role of researchers reconsidered. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies 14(2), 106-129.
Krinsky, J. (2007). Free labor: workfare and the contested language of neoliberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Krinsky, J. and C. Barker (2009). Movement strategizing as developmental learning: perspectives from cultural-historical activity theory. In H. Johnston (Ed.) Culture, Social Movements, and Protest. New York: Routledge.
Krinsky, J. and M. Simonet (2017). Who cleans the park? public work and urban governance in New York City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Laguarta, J. (2016). Struggling to learn, learning to struggle: structure and strategy in the 2010-11 University of Puerto Rico student strike. PhD dissertation. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Lave, J. and E. Wenger (1991). Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1996). The right to the city. Writings on cities. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Linebaugh, P. (2014). Stop, thief! The commons, enclosures, and resistance. PM Press.
Loh, P., & Agyeman, J. (2018). Urban food sharing and the emerging Boston food solidarity economy. Geoforum.
Lowe, J. & Thaden, E. (2016) Deepening stewardship: resident engagement in community land trusts. Urban Geography 37:4, pages 611-628.
Madden, D. and P. Marcuse (2016). In defense of housing. New York: Verso.
Newman, K. and E.K. Wyly (2006). The right to stay put, revisited: gentrification and resistance to displacement in New York City. Urban Studies 43 (1), pp. 23-57.
Niewolny, K. L., & Wilson, A. L. (2009). What happened to the promise? A critical (re) orientation of two sociocultural learning traditions. Adult Education Quarterly 60(1), pp. 26-45
Picture the Homeless (2012). Banking on vacancy: homelessness and real estate speculation. Report. New York. http://picturethehomeless.org/project/banking-on-vacancy-homelessness-real-estate-speculation/
Pratt, G., & Rosner, V. (Eds.). (2012). The global and the intimate: feminism in our time. Columbia University Press.
Ronderos, L.N. (2012). East Harlem affordable housing under threat: strategies for preserving rent-regulated units. Report. New York: Regional Plan Association for Community Board 11. http://www.rpa.org/library/pdf/RPA-East-Harlem-Affordable-Housing-Under-Threat.pdf
Rosenberg, G. & Yuen, J. (2012). Beyond housing: urban agriculture and commercial development by community land trusts. Lincoln Institute for Land Policy
Roy, A. (2003). Paradigms of propertied citizenship: transnational techniques of analysis.
Urban Affairs Review, 38(4), pp. 463-491.
Saegert, S. (2016). Rereading “The housing question” in light of the foreclosure crisis. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 15(3).
Saegert, S., Greer, A., Thaden, E. P., & Anthony, D. L. (2015). Longing for a better American dream: homeowners in trouble evaluate shared equity alternatives. Social Science Quarterly, 96(2), 297-312.
Sannino, A., Engeström, Y. and M. Lemos (2016). Formative interventions for expansive learning and the learning sciences. Journal of the Learning Sciences 25 (4), pp. 599-633.
Sawchuk, P. (2011) Anti-poverty activism from a CHAT perspective: a comparison of learning across three organizations. Adult Education Research Conference. Paper 90. http://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2011/papers/90
Stein, S. (2019). Capital city: gentrification and the real estate state. Verso Books.
Stetsenko, A. (2008). From relational ontology to transformative activist stance on development and learning: expanding Vygotsky’s (CHAT) project. Cultural Studies of Science Education 3 (2), pp. 471-491.
Thaden, E. (2011). Stable homes in a turbulent economy: delinquencies and foreclosures remain in community land trusts. Report. Lincoln Land Institute.
Thompson, M. (2015). Between boundaries: from commoning and guerrilla gardening to community land trust development in Liverpool. Antipode, 47(4), pp. 1021-1042.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and language. A. Kozulin (Ed). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (2008) The problem of age. Online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1934/problem-age.htm
Waters, T.J. and V. Bach. (2016). Making the rent: tenant conditions in New York City’s changing neighborhoods. Report. New York: The Community Service Society. http://www.cssny.org/publications/entry/making-the-rent-2016
Yee, V. (2015). Families endure roaches, mice, and failed promises. New York Times (August 28).
Angotti, T. (2007). Community land trusts and low-income, multifamily housing: the case of Cooper Square. Working Paper. Lincoln Institute for Land Policy. http://infostation1.net/anthony/community%20land%20trust.pdf
Ansanelli, S., Feiger, L., Harrison, P., Hoogkamer, L., McIver, M., Shedletsky, J., Tian, B., and Q. Wu (2012). Community land trusts in New York City. Studio report, Department of Urban Planning, Columbia University, advised by Peter Marcuse and Jeffrey Lowe. New York: NEDAP.
Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (2015). Real affordability: an evaluation of Bloomberg’s housing program and recommendations to strengthen affordable housing policy. Report. New York. http://www.anhd.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Real-Affordability-Evaluation-of-the-Bloomberg-Housing-Program2.pdf
Barker, C. (2014). Expansive learning under fire. Talk given to the Center for Research on Activity, Development, and Learning (CRADLE), University of Helsinki, April 24. Online at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bz3wUg3e6r_4Zjh1a0x1NUg0VVU/edit (accessed 5 March, 2019).
Bratt, R, Stone, M. and C. Hartman, eds. (2006) A right to housing: Foundation for a new social agenda. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s talk. New York: Norton.
Bunce, S. (2016). Pursuing urban commons: Politics and alliances in community land trust activism in East London. Antipode, 48(1), pp. 134-150.
Caffentzis G. and Federici S. (2014) Commons against and beyond capitalism. Community Development Journal 49(s1), pp. i92–i105.
Cahill, C. (2007). Repositioning ethical commitments: Participatory action research as a relational praxis of social change. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 6(3), pp. 360-373.
Casper-Futterman, E. (2016). Overcoming the “Scalar stalemate” in community development. Metropolitics.
Choi, M., Van Zandt, S., & Matarrita-Cascante, D. (2018). Can community land trusts slow gentrification? Journal of Urban Affairs, 40(3), pp. 394-411.
Coalition for the Homeless (2017) The catastrophe of homelessness: facts about homelessness. Website. http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/the-catastrophe-of-homelessness/facts-about-homelessness/
Collins, C. (2011). Reflections on CHAT and Freire's Participatory Action Research from the west of Scotland: “Praxis,” Politics, and the “Struggle for Meaningful Life.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 18 (2), pp. 98-114.
Davis, J.E. (2010). The community land trust reader. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
DeFilippis, J. (2004). Unmaking Goliath: community control in the face of global capital. New York: Routledge.
DeFilippis, J., Williams, O.R., Pierce, J., Martin, D., Kruger, R., and A.H. Esfahani (2019). On the transformative potential of community land trusts in the United States. Antipode (online advance publication), pp. 1-23.
DeRienzo, H. (1994). Managing the crisis. City Limits (December).
De Smet, B. (2015). A dialectical pedagogy of revolt. Leiden: Brill.
Engels, F. (1872). The Housing Question. Online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/
Engelsman, U., Rowe, M., and Southern, A. (2016). Community land trusts: A radical or reformist response to The Housing Question today? Acme: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 15 (3), pp. 589-615.
Engelsman, U., Rowe, M., & Southern, A. (2018). Community land trusts, affordable housing and community organising in low-income neighbourhoods. International Journal of Housing Policy, 18(1), pp. 103-123.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: an Activity-Theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.
Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive learning at work: toward an activity-theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work 14 (1): pp. 133-156.
Fields, D. (2015). Contesting the financialization of urban space: community-based organizations and the struggle to preserve affordable rental housing in New York City.” Journal of Urban Affairs.
Fullilove, M.T. (2009). Root shock: how tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it. New York: Random House.
George, H. (1884). Progress and poverty: An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions, and of increase of want with increase of wealth, the remedy. W. Reeves.
Gray, K. A., & Galande, M. (2011). Keeping “community” in a community land trust. Social Work Research, 35(4), pp. 241-248.
Hart, G. (2004). Geography and development: critical ethnographies. Progress in Human Geography, 28(1), pp. 91-100.
Harvey, D. (2003). The right to the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27 (4), pp. 939-941.
Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities. New York: Verso.
Hodkinson, S. (2012). The return of the housing question. Ephemera 12 (4), pp. 423-444.
Holland, D., & Garcia Correal, D. (2013). Assessing the transformative significance of movements & activism: lessons from a postcapitalist politics. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 14(2), pp. 130-159.
Huron, A. (2018). Carving out the commons: tenant organizing and housing cooperatives in Washington, DC. Minneaopolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Katz, C. (1996). Towards minor theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14(4), pp. 487-499.
Katz, C. (2001). On the grounds of globalization: a topography for feminist political engagement. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(4), pp. 1213-1234.
Kontinen, T. (2013). A Gramscian perspective on developmental work research: contradictions, power and the role of researchers reconsidered. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies 14(2), 106-129.
Krinsky, J. (2007). Free labor: workfare and the contested language of neoliberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Krinsky, J. and C. Barker (2009). Movement strategizing as developmental learning: perspectives from cultural-historical activity theory. In H. Johnston (Ed.) Culture, Social Movements, and Protest. New York: Routledge.
Krinsky, J. and M. Simonet (2017). Who cleans the park? public work and urban governance in New York City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Laguarta, J. (2016). Struggling to learn, learning to struggle: structure and strategy in the 2010-11 University of Puerto Rico student strike. PhD dissertation. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Lave, J. and E. Wenger (1991). Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1996). The right to the city. Writings on cities. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Linebaugh, P. (2014). Stop, thief! The commons, enclosures, and resistance. PM Press.
Loh, P., & Agyeman, J. (2018). Urban food sharing and the emerging Boston food solidarity economy. Geoforum.
Lowe, J. & Thaden, E. (2016) Deepening stewardship: resident engagement in community land trusts. Urban Geography 37:4, pages 611-628.
Madden, D. and P. Marcuse (2016). In defense of housing. New York: Verso.
Newman, K. and E.K. Wyly (2006). The right to stay put, revisited: gentrification and resistance to displacement in New York City. Urban Studies 43 (1), pp. 23-57.
Niewolny, K. L., & Wilson, A. L. (2009). What happened to the promise? A critical (re) orientation of two sociocultural learning traditions. Adult Education Quarterly 60(1), pp. 26-45
Picture the Homeless (2012). Banking on vacancy: homelessness and real estate speculation. Report. New York. http://picturethehomeless.org/project/banking-on-vacancy-homelessness-real-estate-speculation/
Pratt, G., & Rosner, V. (Eds.). (2012). The global and the intimate: feminism in our time. Columbia University Press.
Ronderos, L.N. (2012). East Harlem affordable housing under threat: strategies for preserving rent-regulated units. Report. New York: Regional Plan Association for Community Board 11. http://www.rpa.org/library/pdf/RPA-East-Harlem-Affordable-Housing-Under-Threat.pdf
Rosenberg, G. & Yuen, J. (2012). Beyond housing: urban agriculture and commercial development by community land trusts. Lincoln Institute for Land Policy
Roy, A. (2003). Paradigms of propertied citizenship: transnational techniques of analysis.
Urban Affairs Review, 38(4), pp. 463-491.
Saegert, S. (2016). Rereading “The housing question” in light of the foreclosure crisis. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 15(3).
Saegert, S., Greer, A., Thaden, E. P., & Anthony, D. L. (2015). Longing for a better American dream: homeowners in trouble evaluate shared equity alternatives. Social Science Quarterly, 96(2), 297-312.
Sannino, A., Engeström, Y. and M. Lemos (2016). Formative interventions for expansive learning and the learning sciences. Journal of the Learning Sciences 25 (4), pp. 599-633.
Sawchuk, P. (2011) Anti-poverty activism from a CHAT perspective: a comparison of learning across three organizations. Adult Education Research Conference. Paper 90. http://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2011/papers/90
Stein, S. (2019). Capital city: gentrification and the real estate state. Verso Books.
Stetsenko, A. (2008). From relational ontology to transformative activist stance on development and learning: expanding Vygotsky’s (CHAT) project. Cultural Studies of Science Education 3 (2), pp. 471-491.
Thaden, E. (2011). Stable homes in a turbulent economy: delinquencies and foreclosures remain in community land trusts. Report. Lincoln Land Institute.
Thompson, M. (2015). Between boundaries: from commoning and guerrilla gardening to community land trust development in Liverpool. Antipode, 47(4), pp. 1021-1042.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and language. A. Kozulin (Ed). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (2008) The problem of age. Online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1934/problem-age.htm
Waters, T.J. and V. Bach. (2016). Making the rent: tenant conditions in New York City’s changing neighborhoods. Report. New York: The Community Service Society. http://www.cssny.org/publications/entry/making-the-rent-2016
Yee, V. (2015). Families endure roaches, mice, and failed promises. New York Times (August 28).
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Published
2019-12-16
How to Cite
Caldwell, H., Krinsky, J., Brunila, M., & Ranta, K. (2019). Learning to Common, Commoning as Learning: The Politics and Potentials of Community Land Trusts in New York City. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(6), 1207–1233. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i6.1763
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