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Abstract:
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"In recent years, politicians, lobbyists and voters in the United States have often seemed polarized--or paralyzed--over where to draw the line between private and public rights in land. Common property, defined as group- or community-owned private property, straddles that line.
"Most recognized common property is in natural resources, and most recognized commoners are rural people in developing countries. But the concept of commons might also apply to some aspects of urban land in the United States. At the least, common property theory may help U.S. policymakers understand more clearly what is at stake in debates about land rights.
"At Voices from the Commons, the June 1996 conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property in Berkeley, California, the Lincoln Institute assembled a dozen researchers and practitioners from the U.S. to discuss these new forms of commons, some of which are described in this article: land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives, incidental open spaces, housing -- including group homes, gated or common-interest developments, the use of urban public property by the homeless, and converted military bases."
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