Sustainable Urban Green Commons Governance in Intricate Land Tenure Systems

The mismatch between scarce urban resources and overconsumption has put the continuous supply of critical resources at risk. One is urban green spaces, whose functions are more critical in current climate change and social inclusion debates. Given the prioritisation of financial value over the use-value of land - under the state's watch and the market's intimate role - as a culprit in the dwindling of urban green spaces, the commons are normatively deployed as guaranteed pathways to sustainable and equitable provision of green spaces. With the Ostromian (heritage CPRs) and alterglobalisationist perspectives of the commons as departure points, my PhD research seeks to investigate how the commons can survive, perpetuate and diffuse under changing political, social, economic and ecological conditions in both Switzerland and Ghana. Beyond that, it seeks to critically reflect on how the commons might perpetuate systems of inequity and unsustainable distribution and use of resources. The main objective seeks to understand how political, economic, social and ecological conditions shape conditions for successful and failed urban green commons. With the cross-disciplinary outlook of the main objective, the study will take an interdisciplinary approach by combining methods and approaches in human geography, new institutionalism, political ecology, economics and urban planning. While doing so, it seeks to harness these disciplines' theoretical and methodological prowess to understand - but also to engage the disciplines in - the commons contribution to discourses of decommodification and a post-growth society. My research explores urban commons in the Swiss and Ghanaian contexts. In both geographic contexts, the role of property cannot be overlooked. For this reason, I find this workshop timely for some of the key themes I would like to explore in my research.