Today at The Awl there’s a nice long read about the city I live in Troy, NY. I’ve written about Troy before and it certainly never runs out of interesting stories. Luke Stoddard Nathan, the author of the piece, and I spoke for a few hours about his essay a month or so ago and after reading the finished piece (you should too!) I remembered some of the ground we covered over beers. Luke’s essay follows the peculiar story of Washington Park –one of only three private parks in New York State— and the decades-long argument over who owns the park and who should be allowed to use it. When we spoke I mentioned that problems like Washington Park are ultimately the result of a lack of imagination when it comes to governance. We have two bad options: perpetually under-funded public systems and restrictive private ones. This is also a technological problem because not only are bureaucracies a kind of technology, but so are parks insomuch as they are built things that result from applied knowledge. How do you solve a problem like Washington Park?
First a little bit more about Washington Park from Luke:
An 1840 deed of partition established Washington Park in Troy, New York, a small city near Albany, at the meeting of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. According to a walking tour booklet co-produced by the Rensselaer County Historical Society and the Washington Park Association (W.P.A.), the grantors, all “prominent businessmen or professionals in Troy,” acquired fourteen acres of land at the edge of downtown. They sliced it into narrow lots for adjoining row houses, which were then sold off “in a dizzying array of transactions” over the next twenty-five years. At the center of the subdivision, the developers plotted the two-acre square as an amenity for the exclusive use of surrounding lot owners; they put a fence around it. Sixty-six lots, twenty of which did not actually face the park, were named in the deed.
A Catholic church moved in on the northeast corner in 1843 which severely hurt property values (it still stands today and is gorgeous) and by the Panic of 1873 what was supposed to be a posh urban enclave of Victorian mansions looking in on a luxurious garden turned into apartments overlooking a modest fenced-in park. Today the old-growth trees are beautiful but the grass and outdoor furniture could use a lot of work. It is kept up through maintenance fees assessed by the WPA but there are also arguments over whether or not it should be taxed like private property. You can (and should) read Luke’s essay for a full accounting of that long and ongoing argument.
What’s important to me, and what I think will be interesting here, is that problems of ownership and governance are closely tied to the things that are governed and owned. Parks, by definition, don’t really move and so it makes sense that the organizations that take care of them be set up to last for a long time. Parks also require a sort of singular management structure. Imagine a park where people planted whatever they wanted, threw in whatever benches they thought were nice, and maybe a connoisseur of Bar-B-Q built a smoker for a whole pig. The smoke would waft into the chess tables and one plant would block the sun of another. Typically, this management problem is dealt with by assigning a single bureaucracy to manage parks. Cities have departments devoted to such things or they enter into agreements with private management companies to maintain plazas or other outdoor event spaces.
Washington Park and private parks like it are different though. They limit access to a set population and the resources that go into them are extremely finite or maybe even personal. Luke’s essay is full of quotes from residents that liken the park to a communal front lawn and they would not let anyone else on to it any more than one should expect a suburban home owner to open up the space immediately in front of their homes to perfect strangers.
Holding things in common is a great way to manage resources although we have badly fallen out of the habit of doing so. The often-repeated phrase “tragedy of the commons” is always there to remind us that things left up to groups often go the way of a dorm room sink: ignored, abused, and dirty. The members of the WPA are understandably nervous that their park would go the way of the dorm room sink but that’s only because most of us only have experience with the duality of either totally private or totally public ownership. Either everyone can use something or only a single person (or group) can use it. Commons law, represents everything in between these two extremes. It is an ancient form of resource management and we are living through what can only be called an historical anomaly where commons are rarely used. For example, here is Susan Jane Buck Cox describing how English villagers were expected to use common pastures to feed their cattle:
Common appendant is the right of the villagers who owned their own land within the manor to feed their animals used in agriculture upon the lord’ s “waste,” i.e., that land within the borders of the lord’s domain that was not under cultivation. … The lord’ s waste was used for grazing during the growing season when the tenant’s land was under cultivation. In turn, during the winter the tenant used his own land and the harvests of hay to support his livestock. Thus, he was not permitted to put more animals on the lord’ s land in summer than his own land could feed for the winter. To do otherwise would be to abuse the lord’s pasture.
Common appendant is just one of many different forms of common ownership and use. The only thing that all commons systems have in common is that they have rules to prevent a tragedy. There are as many ways of managing a park as there are parks and it would be a shame if a beautiful patch of land like Washington Park was sealed off to the rest of the world or abused until it is useless. Is there another way?
One major exception to our collective lack of experience with commons management is the Internet. The Internet is neither owned by a single entity nor is it quite publicly owned. Instead it is a patchwork of different ownership models that still technically work together to form a global communication system. I’m reticent to ask questions like “what can the Internet teach us about managing a park?” since the Internet is very different from a park and, as I said at the beginning, organizational structures tend to match the things they manage. What works for the Internet will not necessarily work for a park. But we can draw inspiration from our rare experiences with common ownership and make something new.
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