[p2p-research] The rise and fall (and rise) of the commons

[Ryan Lanham]

I have been in Savannah GA the last few days.  It is interesting.  The
colony was founded in 1733 as a haven for debtors.  The idea was to advance
the commons in all its forms and to have people work together toward common
abundance.  Streets were planned around commons with public trust spaces
given the priority on every commons.  Interesting aside tht I had never
noticed before is that the first "public houses" became "pubs"--bars.  That
was 1733.

The experiment really never started off in any ideal sense with people
immediately jockeying for individual advantage, status and reduced work, and
it collapsed totally by 1755 when slavery was introduced (Georgia was the
only one of the 13 colonies founded without slavery and was a global
innovator in that respect).

Those interested in the success and failure of the commons would find much
of interest in the early founding ideas of Savannah.  One wonders what we
might have learned to make success any more likely.

Savannah has collapsed, burned and regrown again and again as a now
beautiful but sometimes troubled city--really an American ideal of sorts.
Its current leading enterprise is the fastest growing arts university in the
US, the Savannah College of Art and Design, which regularly uses its
academic output in historical preservation as a gift to the city and has
innovated by moving massive quantities of quality buildings it buys and
restores into its own inventory of distributed classrooms and studios.

The commons is an idea that continuously fails...and continuously thrives in
new manifestations and forms.  Savannah is perhaps one of the most
interesting versions of the rise, fall and rise again of the commons.

Ryan Lanham
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