In New Mexico, irrigation channels that have been in continuous operation for three centuries replenish and nourish the wetlands of the American Southwest. These channels are known as Acequias – communally managed water systems built on democratic tradition. Members of the community own water rights, who then elect a three-person team to oversee the channels. In Cairo and Barcelona, Tahrir Square and Plaza de Catalunya have acted as important sites for voicing political dissatisfaction. The Tahrir Square protests of 2011, for instance, resulted in the eventual toppling of an almost 30-year-old government.
Both the Acequias and the squares of Cairo and Barcelona can be said to be a part of a commons – broadly defined as a set of resources, natural and cultural, shared by people.
The urban centers of Cairo and Barcelona can be defined as urban commons, public spaces which situate the citizens of a place as key, active players in society. The water management systems of New Mexico do the same – allowing citizens to directly shape how a shared resource is used. These examples, amidst a wider reckoning of the inequities perpetuated in architectural practice, underline the immense importance of not only collaboration, but a collaboration that champions the agency of marginalized communities and territories.
Architects need maps. They are an integral part of the design process, and for urban planners, even more so. Architects and urban planners working in the Global South, however, face the extra obstacle of inaccessible map data. Data about the urban conditions of many African cities, for example, is mainly produced outside the continent, by entities that have the necessary funds to pay for official cartography services. That leaves the local populations of many African cities effectively locked out of claiming meaningful agency towards how their cities are planned and designed.
Commons initiatives such as Open Street Maps are an integral and necessary part of bridging this divide. It is a collaborative project with the aim of creating a free editable geographic database of the world. In countries such as Guinea, the bus routes of its capital have been extensively mapped out – an integral part of the standard architectural site analysis that would have otherwise been unavailable on Google Maps. In the Tanzanian city of Mwanza, an ongoing mapping project in the flood-risk Ilemela and Nyamagana municipalities will provide valuable open-access data for its residents, in turn allowing architects based there to easily access essential information that will inform architectural approaches in the region.
In Latin America, women mappers have formed Open Street Map communities, adding useful geospatial data to existing information that often prioritizes men. A group – Geochicas – trains women on how to use the platform, leading to projects such as the mapping of femicides in Nicaragua, and an ongoing project to map the streets named after women in Latin America and Spain. Open Street Map communities have an important role to play in an architectural capacity, allowing potential architects to access data on their own communities without needing academic subscriptions, and providing spatial data that is more up to date in rapidly evolving contexts.
A commons approach, however, can span past maps and into architectural designs. Shortly after winning the 2016 Pritzker Prize, Alejandro Aravena, through his practice ELEMENTAL, released plans for four social housing projects for open-source use. Featured in the package are detailed CAD drawings and a short text outlining the rationale for making the drawings open-access.
The rationale is simple – amidst a worldwide housing crisis, the market reduces and displaces, reducing the footprint of new housing and displacing communities to urban peripheries. The release of these plans to public domain allows for incremental housing design to take place, where residents are given the framework to construct their own housing which they can then adapt over time.
There are limitations, of course. The four social housing projects are evidently very much rooted in their Chilean and Mexican contexts, but one would be able to make adjustments to the designs dependent on local codes, regulations, and materials. They are most effective as a provocation, laying bare the lack of transparency in institutional social housing projects, and providing an architectural housing strategy amid stifling institutional bureaucracy.
In recent years, platforms such as Opendesk and Wikihouse have entered the fray. The former a group of designers that share their furniture designs under a Creative Commons license, and the latter an open-source construction system using machine-cut wood panels to build structures, fostering a community where users can share projects on their own.
Commons projects, from collaborative open-access mapping to the public release of social housing plans, help drive conversations that help us critique the places we live in. What is evident is that radical transparency has an ever-expanding role to play in shaping our built environment.
