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Citizen Infrastructure

Relational property

A lot of what makes commoning hard comes down to one inherited idea: property as absolute dominion. In the Western legal tradition descended from John Locke, to own a thing is to have exclusive, near-total control over it — “this is mine, that’s yours.” David Bollier argues that frame quietly imposes a whole set of social relationships and individual identities, ones that make it hard to think relationally about each other’s needs at all.

A different frame

Section titled “A different frame”

Bollier and Silke Helfrich call the alternative relationalised property. Instead of absolute ownership with hard walls, property becomes a set of porous boundaries: under terms agreed by a community, you may use something — without claiming exclusive dominion over it. This isn’t exotic. Indigenous, traditional, and many global-south communities already treat property this way; from their vantage point, the Lockean version can look frankly strange.

You can hack the law toward it

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You don’t have to wait for the whole legal system to change. Bollier points to legal hacks — clever uses of existing law that open a different kind of relationship among people making things together:

  • Creative Commons licences and the GPL (free/open-source software) use copyright against enclosure, guaranteeing that shared work stays shareable. (This wiki is itself under Creative Commons — a small legal hack.)
  • Community land trusts hold land in trust so it stays affordable and locally governed, out of the speculative market.
  • Initiatives like A Land for All in Israel/Palestine try to reframe a bitter conflict away from “one nation or two” toward sharing a land — a relational rather than exclusive claim.

A market-based cousin: self-assessed property

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Some thinkers reach a similar destination through markets rather than community custom. The 19th-century economist Henry George observed that most of a plot’s value comes from the community around it, not its owner — an empty Manhattan would be nearly worthless. The SALSA / Harberger mechanism builds on that: you self-assess what your possession is worth, pay a fee on that figure, and must stand ready to sell at that price, with the proceeds recycled to the community that creates the value. It lands on the same idea this page is about — possession as stewardship, not absolute dominion — but arrives from the plurality / RadicalxChange direction. See plural mechanisms.

Relational property is the legal-and-cultural underside of the commons, a counter to enclosure, and a close cousin of protocol — coordination by shared, adaptable agreement rather than top-down control. For practical vehicles, see Fund collective work.

Sources

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