Community commons
We have a game in my family where we work out how we can blame things on Margaret Thatcher. If the problem predates Margaret Thatcher, then enclosure. Otherwise, the Normans.
Here's a fun article, A Short History of Enclosure in Britain and by fun I mean utterly enraging:
Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.
Until we get that guillotine going we have libraries.
We need to join our local library. Ours recently got threatened with closure or being handed over to the community - which is what councils do when they want to close it but can't handle the bad press. This got everyone very riled up and talky... and produced about as much actual community action as a slap with a wet leaf of lettuce. It didn't get closed which I think is because that was never the plan, not because The People wrested victory from the jaws of power.
Our libraries offer all sorts of cool stuff far beyond books. Books, ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and newspapers, films, music. Often local interest stuff and community information. Plus most have clubs, games, courses, sessions for kids and parents, workshops, and so on. Libraries in my city have knit and natter, a games afternoon, writing groups, computer literacy drop-ins, sessions with council support, all sorts. Libraries are an excellent third place. Libraries are kind of a miracle.
There are other kinds of libraries, different types of sharing. I suspect a lot of (most? all?) extended families operate an informal system like this. The call gets put out on whatsapp: my sister needs a carpet cleaner. (My sister has three small children, she often needs a carpet cleaner.) My brother's mother-in-law has a carpet cleaner. Job done, capitalism fought.
My family also has a lot of DIY type tools inherited from my grandfather on one side of the family and my dad on the other. We have a spreadsheet of all these, plus our own, across six households. We all have our own screwdrivers, yes, but we don't need more than one reciprocating saw or angle grinder and so on, between us. We don't even really need those between us. They could be shared by many more people. The spreadsheet isn't for tracking or anything so complicated. It's more like: check the spreadsheet before we buy or hire anything. If it's not there: we can get the thing. And add it to the spreadsheet for the future.
When I lived in London I signed up to something like this. But it wasn't. It was only online, which I think might be a big part of the problem. No skin in the game. No one ever borrowed anything I put up. I never borrowed anything either.
There are over a hundred Libraries of Things in the UK. One of my secret ambitions is to start one in my city. There's also Freecycle, which is a great thing but still relies on there being a lot of stuff being passed around and privately owned, even if it was given free.
This could be (should be? is?) something existing community platforms facilitate. I'm not in any local chats or social media groups or those local forum things. From what I have heard, they are hotbeds of vile, bullying sentiments.
It would be good to try out on a street level maybe. Streets are very different things though. There's a one-way and then pedestrianised residential street round the corner from me that has benches and planting and a little library box. The temptation is to say, Well that's because it's a quiet little street. And it is. But maybe that is also an excuse when I live on a busy bus route into town and assume it could never work here. (What wouldn't work here, or I would already have been all over it, is a community front garden. Fumes and fumes everywhere.)
This is all very solarpunk and I love solarpunk so I'm going to pop some Andrewism videos in here to finish on a positive note: How To Build A Solarpunk City and How We Can Make Solarpunk A Reality
Part of my community thoughts probably.