Governing the urban commons: Democratic innovations and the right to the city

From the perspective of political theory, participatory democratic theory and deliberative approaches generally seem to be the natural interlocutors for the frequently asked question of how to innovate democracy. The focus is usually on mini-publics that promise to achieve two normative ideals of the respective theories at once: On the input side, the possibility of more inclusive citizen participation; on the output side, the epistemic expectation of considered judgments (Landemore 2021; Lafont 2020). This paper does not seek to deny the relevance of this perspective, but to point out two of its blind spots. First, it narrows the normative assessment of democratic innovations to questions of political opinion formation. And second, linking mini-publics and deliberative theory leaves other existing examples of democratic innovations and their further development theoretically unexplored. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to broaden and deepen our understanding of democratic innovations in terms of both the normative objectives and the political problems that democratic innovations might address. To this end, I turn to the city and examine how democratic innovations can realize rights claims that have been justified with regard to questions of urban injustice such as gentrification or housing (Huber/Wolkenstein 2018; Kohn 2016). Though those claims for a right to the city or for occupancy rights of urban residents address substantial democratic values, they regularly lack legal force. This paper argues that cooperative governance provides a way to fulfill these rights by giving affected urban residents an equal say in co-shaping the city. In doing so, urban democratic innovations such as cooperative housing management or community-led districts ultimately contribute to alter our notion of property and further realize the idea of the commons in the city.