This book moves beyond seeing the commons in the past tense, an entity passed over from the public into the private, to reimagine the commons as a process, a reconstitution, and a site of convening practices. It highlights new spaces of gathering opening up, such as the digital commons, and new practices of being in common, such as community economies and solidarity networks. The commons is seen as a contested domain of the collective and as a changing way of being in common, with the balance poised in the tensile play between political economy and social innovation. The book focuses on the possibility of recovering a future in which more can be held by the many, focusing on three concepts: nation and nature, publics and rights, and bodies.

1. Thinking the Commons

2. The Commons and Offshore Worlds

3. Politics in Common in the Digital Age

4. Commons Feeling in Animal Welfare and Online Libertarian Activism

5. The Liminal Paracommons of Future Natural Resource Efficiency Gains

6. The Right to Not be Excluded: Common Property and the Struggle to Stay Put

7. International Humanitarian Law and the Possibility of the Commons

8. The Shrinking Commons and Uneven Geographies of Development

9. The Urban Metabolic Commons: Rights, Civil Society, and Subaltern Struggle

10. Inroads into Altruism

11. Revisiting a Bodily Commons: Enclosures and Openings in the Bioeconomy

12. Commoning as a Postcapitalist Politics

Ash Amin is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Philip Howell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK.