Commons tut.

Hi all,

Gabriel here. Year 2 geography major... Apologies for the slow response.

REgarding the topic, i derived my definition from reading the suggested David Feeny article. He summarised Garrett Hardin's view that a commons has the following list of features:

1) Open access to a community
Anyone within a group (household, school, country,etc.)can tap into the pool of resources in question.

2) Subtractability
If one member uses too much of any resource, other members of the community will be unable to benefit from that same resource.

3) Excludability
More like an impossibility to exclude really. Regulation to limit usage or access to a common area is impossible or almost so.

My examples of a form of commons would be the cinema. The community with access to this resource would be anyone who has bought a ticket. Whatever snacks they buy or consume, there is that much less to go around for the other patrons. Wherever they sit, there is one less chair available and so on. This applies to environment and aesthetics of the cinema as well, in that if someone decided to litter or put their feet up on another's chair, other user's experience in using the place would be negatively affected. You can't throw the person out unless someone actually saw and reported the matter, by which time it'll probably be too late since everyone usually leaves at the end of the show.

This is one of the smaller scale commons (smaller in terms of community of users). Others that were suggested would include the NUS Library, supermarkets, HDB estates and even the transport system, some of which i think my NUS group mates have already covered in part...