Negotiating Landed Commons and their Governance: The Case of Slow Paths in Flanders

This PhD research reveals the detrimental social and ecological aspects of privatisation, fragmentation and encroachment of urban and rural spaces in Flanders. It sets out to explore these aspects at the intersection of spatial planning, ownership regimes and land use rights. It aims to understand how the development of community-based shared land use patterns (Commons) in Flanders help to transcend the ubiquitous private-public divide in terms of landownership and use rights. The dissertation questions how land use rights emerge, how their governance is constituted and how they, along with shared ‘landed Commons-based’ land uses, are built. More specifically, the dissertation's focus is on what motivates and inspires people to collaborate on building a Commons. The dissertation mobilises the ‘Theorie des cités’ by Boltanski and Thévenot, complemented with institutionalist planning theory, social innovation theory, social psychology and systems psychodynamics, to investigate these questions through Action research. The networks of slow paths in Flanders are taken as a case study, specifically two intermunicipal slow path connections in the Landscape Park south of the city of Antwerp. These case studies illustrate how slow paths as intermediary spaces can be a leverage for a Commons-based governance of diverse land use; in other words, how Commons can bring back the community logic in the governance of diverse land use. Due to the complexity and hybrid character of their management, slow paths can help in moving beyond the dichotomy of public versus private that dominates market-oriented capitalism. Slow paths further illustrate how an act of Commoning can contribute to the creation of a process allowing possible conflicts to take place, but leading to cooperation among different actors and resulting in a more democratic form of planning that embraces the feelings, values and reasoning of various actors. This PhD sees collective action and Action research as an act of Commoning, which in itself also becomes a Commons. The intention of the dissertation is to reintroduce shared use as a countermovement against the urbanisation and fragmentation of Flanders, be it in urban or rural areas. With this, the dissertation hopes to contribute to more sustainable forms of urbanisation and de-urbanisation.