‘Commons sense tells us it’s time to turn to cities to protect common resources that make food and city life come to life.’

—Wayne Roberts

Field notes from this week

First the bad news: The world is in deep trouble.

Now the good news: Maybe cities have what it takes to dig us out.

I just read a grim article by Joseph Heath about global warming and the collapse of fisheries. For some reason, it made me optimistic about the role cities can play in the world, especially with food.

The world’s future looks very bleak when seen through the dark glasses of collective action theory. Sometimes known as “the tragedy of the market” or “market failure,” the view holds that otherwise-smart people keep on chopping down too many trees in a forest, or pouring too much polluted water in a lake, or taking too many fish from the ocean, or dumping too much smoke and carbon into the sky, because there’s no use stopping all by yourself.

If I stop fishing but no-one else does, I just go without any fish sooner than everybody else; so, logically, I will only stop after everyone else does.

Multiply that logic by 7 billion people, and you see the size of the problem.

But I think cities shed a different and brighter light on this problem of collective action.

Cities have a very good record of collective action.

When infectious diseases swept through most Global North cities during the 1800s and early-1900s, for example, cities started cleaning up water supplies, sewage outlets, tenement houses and sweat shops. They didn’t allow the problem to fester until everyone took ill.  

When fires swept through most cities during the 1800s and early 1900s, city fire departments cracked down on building bylaws.

When people were made ill by food-borne diseases, cities campaigned for pasteurized milk and launched strict city health inspection of restaurants.

I think the reason for that pattern of civic success is fairly obvious.

The simple explanation is that cities are close to where the problem is, close to where the people who benefit from solving the problem live, and far from where many of the corporate headquarters that profit from the problem live.  

The fancy explanation comes from Elinor Ostrom, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for figuring out eight occasions when collectivities of people manage their common resources well.

Almost all of her principles echo the natural course of events in a city.

Ostrom says you need clear ways of defining boundaries of a problem, for example – as in city limits. She says the rules have to apply to local conditions – where better than a city for that?

She says there must be a scale of penalties for those who violate the rules – as in orders to close down if a restaurant fails a safety test.

And so on.

This is the kind of things cities do well. Most North American and European cities that went through these common problems of the late-1800s and early-1900s have strict rules on such matters, and complaints about them are few and far between. There are very few city neo-liberals, calls for privatizations of fire departments, or for deregulation of restaurant inspections.

I think we have to brag about this aspect of city life.

Thanks to urban analysts such as Jeb Brugman, author of Welcome to the Urban Revolution, we know why cities are economic spark plugs; they have a list of qualities he calls “the urban advantage” – large numbers of people who can buy differentiated and specialized products, for example, thereby encouraging start-up entrepreneurs and innovators. (I review all these urban advantages in a chapter of my own book, Food for City Building.)   

But we should now go beyond the list of reasons for economic success of cities, and look at the city’s ability to deal with resource, environmental and public health issues that national governments have so far failed miserably at.

Let’s face it: Cities are in the best position to deal with the commons.

And urban food is mainly a commons issue – whether it’s gardens on rooftops or in parks, boulevards and school grounds; or mobile healthy food vending at popular intersections; or food buses taking healthy food options to underserved communities; or main streets dedicated to multicultural foods as in a Chinatown or Little India and Little Italy, or community food centers….the list of urban projects that rely on the commons for space and supporters goes on and on.  

Commons sense tells us it’s time to turn to cities to protect common resources that make food and city life come to life.