Collective action and the urban commons.

• Author: Foster, Sheila R.

Urban residents share access to a number of local resources in which they have a common stake. These resources range from local streets and parks to public spaces, to a variety of shared neighborhood amenities. Collectively shared urban resources suffer from the same rivalry and free-riding problems that Garrett Hardin described in his Tragedy of the Commons tale. Scholars have not yet worked up a theory about how this "tragedy" unfolds in the urban context, particularly in light of existing government regulation and control of common urban resources. This Article argues that the tragedy of the urban commons unfolds during periods of "regulatory slippage"--when the level of local government oversight and management of the resource significantly declines, leaving the resource vulnerable to expanded access by competing users and uses. Overuse or unrestrained competition in the use of these resources can quickly lead to congestion, rivalry, and resource degradation. Tales abound in cities across the country of streets, parks, and vacant land that were once thriving urban spaces but have become overrun, dirty, prone to criminal activity, and virtually abandoned by most users.

Proposed solutions to the rivalry, congestion, and degradation that afflict common urban resources typically track the traditional public-private dichotomy of governance approaches. These solutions propose either a more assertive central government role or privatization of the resource. Neither of these proposed solutions has taken root, I argue, because of the potential costs that each carry--costs to the local government during times of fiscal strain, costs to communities where the majority of residents are non-property owners, and costs to internal community governance. What has taken root, however, are various forms of cooperative management regimes by groups of users. Despite the robust literature on self-organized management of natural resources, scholars have largely ignored collective action in the urban context. In fact, many urban scholars have assumed that collective action is unlikely in urban communities where social disorder exists.

This Article highlights the ways in which common urban resources are being managed by groups of users in the absence of government coercion or management and without transferring ownership into private hands. This collective action occurs in the shadow of continued state and local government ownership and oversight of the resources. Formally, although the state continues to hold the regulatory reigns, in practice we see the public role shifting away from a centralized governmental role to what I call an "enabling" one in which state and local governments provide incentives and lend support to private actors who are able to overcome free-riding and coordination problems to manage collective resources. This Article develops this enabling role, marks its contours and limits, and raises three normative concerns that have gone unattended by policymakers.

INTRODUCTION

Urban residents share access to a number of local tangible and intangible resources in which they have a common stake. These resources range from local streets and parks to public spaces to a variety of shared neighborhood amenities. These collectively shared urban resources--what I call "urban commons"--are subject to the same rivalry and free-rider problems that Garrett Hardin wrote about in his Tragedy of the Commons tale. In this classic tale, Hardin warned of the depletion of open-access natural resources where it is difficult to exclude potential users who lack incentives to conserve or sustainably use the resource. (1) Many collectively shared, open-access urban resources have much in common with Hardin's conception of the "pasture open to all" prone to overuse or misuse if improperly managed or regulated. (2)

The urban "commons" generally shares with traditional public goods both a lack of rivalry in consumption (nonrivalrous) and lack of excludability in access to and enjoyment of their benefits (nonexcludable). But they share these characteristics only up to a point. (3) That point is what I will refer to as "regulatory slippage," and it occurs when the level of local government control or oversight of the resource significantly declines, for whatever reason. (4) During periods of regulatory slippage, the temptation to create rivalrous conditions exists for a variety of actors whether they are ordinary pedestrians, opportunistic criminals, or frequent park users. Such users might be tempted to use or consume the common resource in ways that degrade the value or attractiveness of the resource for other types of users and uses. It is at this point when the shared urban resource comes to resemble less of a public good (nonexcludable, nonrivalrous) and more of a traditional "commons" (nonexcludable, rivalrous), subject to the sort of tragedy depicted in Hardin's tale. (5)

Too much usage (either in volume or intensity) of a park or a neighborhood street, for example, can quickly result in congestion. Similarly, certain types or intensity of uses can create incompatibilities with many ordinary uses and conservation of such spaces. (6) Overuse or unrestrained competition in use of the space creates conditions which begin to mimic the type of commons problem that Hardin wrote about--that is, such resources become rivalrous and prone to degradation and perhaps destruction.

Tales abound in many cities of dirty and unsafe streets, parks, and vacant lots that were once thriving urban spaces, but became overrun and degraded in a classic tragedy of the commons scenario. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar's history of Central Park recounts one of the most famous examples of how a common urban resource became rivalrous and subject to overuse and degradation. (7) After years of opening up the park to permit a wide variety of events and groups to use the park, Central Park quickly became a space in which access to the "whole community" posed inevitable conflicts and competition between users. (8) Many saw the park as deteriorating rapidly due to its openness to various events and a potpourri of users, resulting in increased maintenance and cleanup costs which the city was not able to absorb. This deterioration escalated with the onset of the fiscal crisis in the 1970s and the decline in city appropriations, which devastated the entire urban park system, leaving many parks and recreational areas unsafe, dirty, prone to criminal activity, and virtually abandoned by most users. (9)

A similar story can be told about the "neighborhood commons" in many urban communities. (10) The quality of a neighborhood commons--of its street life, sidewalks, open spaces, and public parks--might begin to decline through increasing demands by different users and uses of the space. Demands may overwhelm or confound the ability of government resources to manage and that makes managing the rivalry between users difficult. Lacking such management, the increase in certain types of uses of common space--such as in the case of excessive loitering, aggressive panhandling, graffiti, or littering--will eventually begin to rival, if not overwhelm, other users and uses of this space. (11) Such "chronic street nuisances," for example, will ultimately require either a system of more assertive government control, enforcement of social norms through criminal law, or some form of private governance of these spaces. (12)

The commons problem is in part a problem of open access to rivalrous resources and in part a problem of local governance. Efforts to manage the "commons" typically vacillate between two governance approaches that Hardin and others have developed as a response to commons dilemmas. (13) Averting the tragedy has traditionally been thought to require either a system of private property rights in the commons, in which individual owners could most efficiently internalize the costs imposed on the resource, or a central government management approach which would constrain individual users by regulating access and use of the resource. (14) In the urban context, Robert Ellickson's proposal for "public space zoning"--which would allow cities to more comprehensively regulate open public spaces to control chronic street nuisances--is a contemporary example of the latter. (15) Gated communities--a form of common interest development in which individual property owners own and control shares/ parts of the development, including its common spaces--is a contemporary example of the former. (16)

The choice between government regulation and privatization of the commons does not capture the full range of approaches to commons management, as Elinor Ostrom has famously demonstrated in her work on self-organized, cooperative natural resource management regimes. (17) Her work, and the work of others, (18) introduces a third option for avoiding the tragedy of the commons; namely, a regime in which a group of users is able to overcome collective action problems and manage a common resource without government coercion or the vesting of individual (or group) property fights in the commons.

Although the literature on self-organized management of natural resources has been well developed by Ostrom and others, (19) such collective action has been largely neglected and underdeveloped in the context of urban resources. Instead, social scientists and legal scholars have tended to highlight the lack of collective efficacy in urban communities where social disorder in public spaces exists. (20) This Article instead highlights the ways in which rivalrous and degraded common urban resources are being collectively restored and managed by groups of users in the absence of government coercion and (often) oversight, and without transferring ownership of the resources into private hands. As others have noted, an important element of collective resource management regimes is that such regimes are...