Torange Khonsari on the Potential of Commons/Public Partnerships

Can commoners work constructively with the state, and if so, how? Torange Khonsari, a British scholar of architecture and design activism for 20 years and now a principal at Public Works Group, shares insights on this topic from her new book, 'Commons and Public Partnership: Legitimising a Commons Sphere.' The commons offers a "culture of collaboration, co-governance, relational power, relational ethics, and care-based resource production and management," but the state is often indifferent or hostile to these capacities. Khonsari argues that the state needs to recognize the limits of its centralized, top-down notions of power, and support the commons as an arena of distributed, collective risk-taking with care. If properly designed, commons/public partnerships could provide "a kind of institutional fulcrum” for revamping relations among the economy, ecosystems, and society. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.