In common / Ben Rosamon [and 12 others].

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Cait Johnson; Gabi Lardies -- Common in colony / Ben Rosamond -- Embracing/the joy of collective wealth / Dan Kelly -- [I] put everything in little boxes / Toyah Webb -- The spirit of the commons / Vanessa Arapko -- Papakāinga for the present: new models of collective living on ancestral whenua: an interview with Jade Kake / Cait Puatama Johnson; Gabi Lardies -- 90+ days / Dieneke Jansen -- tēna anō / Amber French -- Alienated patriarchal masculinity and Tāmaki Makaurau / Oliver Cull -- A study of three levels at the Auckland Central Library / Katie Kerr -- A library is what we make it / Freya Elmer -- Water, an introduction / Nate Rew -- A visit to Maungahuka, a ramble through the history of New Zealand's conservation estate and some chit-chat about the weather / Eleanor Cooper -- The colonised subject trying to function inside the corpse of empire / Essa May Ranapiri

"Our first book, In Common, is a volume to bring together knowledge, experience and reflections from different disciplines (activist, academic, poetic, artistic, and so on) around the idea of the commons. A wide range of contributors is making for a rich and multifaceted investigation into the past, present and future of the commons in Aotearoa. Understood as land and resources belonging to all members of a community, historically the commons were areas where people could forage and hunt food, graze livestock and gather together. The commons provided the resources necessary for people's survival without reliance on selling their labour. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the land enclosures in Europe privatised these resources, forcing people into waged labour and to participate in the capitalist system. Colonisation in Aotearoa echoed this process, expropriating and privatising collectively held Māori land and resources, and imposing a system built on the divided economic individual rather than the community. These processes concentrate resources into the hands of a few, and establish classes of people dependent on employment, rather than free access to the means for survival for all. Looking at the past allows us to denaturalise and reject the current situation, to instead imagine and build alternatives. The history of dispossession has been met with opposition and resistance through hikoi, occupations, direct action, organisations and alternative ways of living and producing food. Alongside critique of the capitalist system, which is built on private property and waged labour, new forms of the commons have sprung up within communities, perhaps acting as prototypes for the future." -- Publisher