After 2.5 years at home, studying macrohistory to deepen my understanding of the commons, it seems interest is re-igniting now that the pandemic fears and the effects of its related public policies have largely subsided. I am off for 3 trips this fall, the first one this September will bring me to Sweden (upsala) belgium (ghent, brussels) and France (Finistere,Paris), the 2nd one in Lisbon and Barcelona and the 3rd is under construction but will certainly stop in Antwerp, Belgium.
Below is an invitation for 19 september in Ghent, see the pdf for the description,
CENTRE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Lecture by Michel Bauwens – Ghent – Monday 19th of September 2022 – 15:00-17:00
ABSTRACT
Most people would look at the history of human civilization as an evolving relation between market and state forms, and modern political
struggles have essentially been a battle for supremacy between these two institutional powers. But there is a third, forgotten institution
that has played a vital role in revitalizing and regenerating societies in decline and environmental overshoot: the institution of the
commons. After centuries of decline, since the last decennium of the previous millennium, the commons have made a comeback. First
through the emergence of digital open source communities, then through a tenfold increase in the number of urban commons since the
crisis of 2008, and more recently, through the emergence of 'cosmo-local' productive communities which combine a relocalisation of
physical production with global coordination of knowledge. If the current world situation can be read as a struggle between the market-
dominated model of western capitalism, and the state-dominated model of the Eurasian axis, then the cosmo-local can be seen as a
commons-centric alternative, based on the creation of new global commons institutions that are linked with a smart localization of
production for human need. In this lecture, we will also look at the history of how human modes of consciousness have reacted to geo-
climactic challenges, and what kind of educational institutions we could re-imagine to accompany such deep changes in human
perception and action.