Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2017, 10, 231–247

doi:10.1093/cjres/rsx001
Advance Access publication 18 February, 2017

The sharing economy as the commons

of the 21st century

Karin Bradleya and Daniel Pargmanb

a
Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology,
100 44 Stockholm, Sweden, karin.bradley@abe.kth.se
b
Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of
Technology, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden, pargman@kth.se

Received on November 16, 2015; editorial decision on June 16, 2016; accepted on June 16, 2016

This article aims to make a contribution to the debate on how contemporary collabora-
tive commons, as part of the wider sharing economy, can be understood and supported.
Three cases of contemporary commons are analysed: a DIY bike repair studio, a pop-up
home office concept and Wikipedia. The article shows how the design principles developed
for governing natural resource commons are only partly applicable to these contemporary
commons. It also illustrates the differences in these types of commons in terms of the nature
of the resource being shared, scarcity, barriers to entry and how rules are formulated and
upheld.

Keywords: commons, sharing economy, collaborative economy, digital commons, design principles,
for-benefit sharing platforms
JEL Classifications: P4, O35, O33, Z10

Introduction to the precariatisation of work and further con-

centrate capital and power (Schor, 2014). There
The current dissemination and uptake of shar-
is growing criticism primarily of the effects of
ing economy platforms and services are praised
global for-profit sharing economy platforms
for allowing various under-utilised resources
when these acquire near-monopoly status in
such as homes, tools, clothes and vehicles to
their respective niches—a position from which
be used more effectively for bringing people
they can dictate the rules and conditions for
together, for encouraging the development of
millions of users, hosts or drivers, who do not
more user-centred services and for constitut-
get to share in the growing corporate profits
ing new forms of entrepreneurship (Botsman
(Gansky, 2014; Gorenflo, 2015; Taylor, 2014).
and Rogers, 2011; Gansky, 2010). Others are
However, there is conceptual confusion in
more critical and argue that sharing economy
this debate about the “sharing economy”, and
platforms such as TaskRabbit, Airbnb and
quite differing phenomena are often placed
RelayRides tend to exacerbate homophily, lead

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Bradley and Pargman
under this umbrella term. Sharing economy
platforms can be organised in different ways: as
for-profit corporations, as for-benefit organisa-
tions, as foundations, cooperatives, community
groups or through looser informal networks.
Some operate on a global scale, others are
small and local, having different embedded-
ness in place. Hence, understanding and assess-
ment of sharing economy ‘performance’ may
indeed vary depending on the particular forms
of the sharing economy analysed. Meelen and
Frenken (2015) define the sharing economy as
the interactions of people temporarily letting
other people use their under-utilised resources,
with or without monetary exchange. Services
such as Uber or TaskRabbit thus do not qualify
as part of the sharing economy according to
Meelen and Frenken (2015), but should rather
be considered part of the ‘on-demand econ-
omy’ or the ‘gig economy’.
There is a long history of studying phenom-
ena such as sharing, reciprocity, bartering and
gift-giving that can be of use when studying
the sharing economy (Kolm, 2000; Mauss, 2002
[1924]; Polanyi, 2001 [1944]; Sahlins, 1972). For
example, Russell Belk has written prolifically
about the practice of sharing (Belk, 2010) and
about the relationship between sharing and the
sharing economy (Belk, 2014). In order to con-
tribute to the debate on how sharing economy
practices can be governed in more democratic
and resource-efficient ways, we believe that
theorisation and research on the governing
of the commons can be of use, most notably
the research by Ostrom (1990). Kostakis and
Bauwens (2014) and others have previously
pointed out that parts of the sharing/collabo-
rative economy can indeed be understood as
commons.
Rifkin (2014) uses the term “collaborative
commons” to denote networked commons
like open-source software and hardware, and
argues that these commons democratise access
not only to information, but also to material
resources. The spread of digital technologies
and online platforms has made it considerably
232
easier to create new types of commons that
would previously either have been much more
complicated and costly or even practically
impossible to organise (Shirky, 2008). This in
turn has enabled commentators like Rifkin
(2014) and Mason (2015) to argue that we are
entering a postcapitalist era.
Despite grand visions of the effects of cur-
rent and future collaborative commons, in
reality these face a number of challenges and
are often reliant on a small number of highly
engaged individuals. This and other factors
make it difficult to scale up and gain critical
mass and access to the resources necessary to
compete with mainstream market alternatives.
What factors then are crucial for understanding
the dynamics of contemporary collaborative
commons? In order to investigate this ques-
tion, here we revisit Ostrom’s (1990) institu-
tional design principles for the governance of
long-enduring natural resource commons and
explore whether these principles are relevant
for understanding contemporary collaborative
commons, which are situated in a globalised,
urbanised and digitalised societal context. The
aim of the analysis is to make a contribution to
the debate on how the contemporary collabo-
rative commons, as part of the wider sharing
economy, can be understood theoretically and
how they may be supported.
Ostrom’s design principles are based on
extensive empirical studies of natural resource
commons situated in localised contexts and
where users are reliant on each other and on
these commons for their livelihood. In this arti-
cle, we instead analyse three different cases of
what we will refer to as “21st century commons”:
the Bike Kitchen, Hoffice and Wikipedia. These
are examples of types of commons that have
grown in recent years, being set in a more glo-
balised, urbanised and digitalised world, and
representing different degrees of place specific-
ity, use of digital technologies and social bonds
amongst their users. Natural resource commons
have a much longer history and will of course
continue to be of crucial importance also in the
 The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century
21st century, but here we have opted to ana-
lyse the 21st-century commons, exemplified by
these three cases. The first, the Bike Kitchen, is
an open non-profit Do-It-Yourself (DIY) bike
repair studio that exemplifies a locally anchored
analogue form of commons, but with a set of
general principles, developed through an inter-
national network, which has made the concept
easy to copy and spread across the world. The
Bike Kitchen can be seen as an example of a
form of localised physical commons, often set
in an urban context and similar to e.g. maker
spaces or community gardens. The second case,
Hoffice, is an open concept for arranging tem-
porary “home offices”, i.e. a set of principles for
how to offer and transform a private kitchen
table into a one-day shared office space for
community members. Hoffice is an example
of temporary, pop-up commons, similar to the
“home restaurants” or peer-to-peer ride shar-
ing services that have gained ground with the
spread of digital technologies. The third case
is Wikipedia, an entirely digital commons with
a global reach, although it should be said that
some languages are better represented than
others.
In this article, we build a typology that can be
used as a framework for analysing 21st century
commons by using the three cases described
above and contrasting them with Ostrom’s
natural resource commons (1990). The typol-
ogy is structured around questions such as what
is being shared, who can access the resource in
question and to what extent the commoners
are dependent on the resource. Based on this
typology, we then comment on Ostrom’s design
principles and outline factors that are relevant
for understanding and supporting the 21st cen-
tury commons.
The findings of this article illustrate how the
21st century commons differ from traditional
natural resource commons in several ways—in
terms of the character of the resource being
shared, in terms of what exactly is “scarce”,
barriers to entry and exit, reliance on the
resource, and how rules are formulated and
upheld. Our contribution is hence a structured
understanding of these differences, which can
serve as a basis for future work on developing
more tailored support structures for contem-
porary commons. The 21st century commons
are a vital part of the for-benefit collabora-
tive sharing economy and finding ways to sup-
port them responds to calls by Gansky (2014),
Gorenflo (2015), Kostakis and Bauwens (2014),
and Scholz (2016) to democratise the sharing
economy.
From natural resource commons to
digital commons
During the past few decades there has been
a surge of interest in the notion of the com-
mons, relating the concept to contemporary
struggles over natural resources in the cases
of land grabbing and the privatisation of
water resources (Ross, 2014; Shiva, 1998) and
to debates about urban and digital commons
(Bollier and Selfrich, 2012; Walljasper, 2010).
Discussions over what material and imma-
terial resources and socio-environmental
relations are, or should be, part of the mar-
ket system, under state control and/or self-
governed as commons (outside the state and
market) have historically been, and continue
to be, both a central political concern and
the subject of heated scholarly debate (e.g.
De Angelis, 2007; Hardt and Negri, 2009;
Klein, 2001; Linebaugh, 2008; Neeson, 1993;
Thompson, 1991). An important milestone in
the literature on the commons was Garrett
Hardin’s heavily cited essay “The tragedy of
the commons” (1968). Hardin proposed that
for any common resource, individuals who act
independently and rationally, e.g. according
to their self­interest, will invariably try to max-
imise their own personal benefit. It is thus in
the interest of each individual (for example,
a herder) to overuse the common resource in
question (for example, grazing land). Since
each individual will tend to act according to
their self-interest, this will invariably lead to
233
Bradley and Pargman
the long-term carrying capacity of the land
being exceeded and subsequently to a sub-
optimal outcome for the whole group and
for each individual. While acting in accord-
ance with individual short-term self-interest,
that same individual (and each of their neigh-
bours) will simultaneously act against the long
term interests of the whole group. Hardin’s
conclusion in relation to this dilemma was
that the commons should either be privatised
into parcels of land, or ownership should be
transferred to the government, which would
then bear the responsibility for regulating use
of the land.
Another milestone in the literature about
the commons was Ostrom’s book Governing
the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions
for Collective Action (1990). Where Hardin’s
bleak view was based on extrapolation and
theoretical speculations about the (mis-)use
of the commons, Ostrom instead based her
book on extensive empirical studies of natu-
ral resource commons situated in localised
contexts and where users were dependent on
the continued quality of their grazing lands,
fisheries, forests and irrigation systems for
their livelihood. Ostrom drew on a number of
studies of communities around the world that
in fact had successfully managed their com-
mons for decades and sometimes even for
centuries. These communities had, over time,
developed appropriate institutions (norms
and rules) for the safeguarding and manage-
ment of these common-pool resources. An
example is Swiss villages, which have private
plots that are planted and harvested commu-
nal summer meadows for grazing cows. A rule
dating back to 1517 states that “no citizen may
send more cows to the alp than he could feed
during the winter”. Since wintering a cow is
costly, this rule effectively rations access to
the commons by tying them to private prop-
erty rights in a way that averts overexploi-
tation of the communal summer meadows.
Based on her empirical research, Ostrom for-
mulated the following set of design principles
234
for successful common-pool resource institu-
tions (Ostrom, 1990, p. 90):
1. Define clear group boundaries.
2. Match rules governing use of common goods
to local needs and conditions.
3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can
participate in modifying the rules.
4. Make sure the rule­ making rights of com-
munity members are respected by outside
authorities.
5. Develop a system, implemented by com-
munity members, for monitoring members’
behaviour.
6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.
7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dis-
pute resolution.
David Bollier (2012, p.  212) succinctly sum-
marises the difference between Hardin’s and
Ostrom’s perspectives on the commons: “Outer
space, the oceans and the Internet are com-
mon-pool resources. They don’t belong to any-
body individually or to any state individually.
But they are not commons. Commons require
the active participation of the people in for-
mulating and enforcing the rules that govern
them”. A key to understanding what constitutes
commons is hence that they include some form
of self-governing beyond the market and the
state (Bollier and Helfrich, 2012). What Hardin
discussed was not so much the commons as
common-pool resources with an open-access
regime that lacks norms and rules for how to
manage and utilise the resources in question.
With the growth of the internet and online
communities, Ostrom’s theorisation has been
extended and discussed in relation to the digi-
tal sphere (Benkler, 2006; de Rosnay and Le
Crosnier, 2012; Hess and Ostrom, 2003; Kollock
and Smith, 1996; Kollock, 1996; Lev-On, 2013).
Certain characteristics of digital resources dif-
fer fundamentally from the real-world finite and
rival local natural resources that served as a back-
drop to Ostrom’s design principles. Intellectual
and digital resources can rather be regarded as
 The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century
infinitely reproducible and non-rival (Madison
et  al., 2010), and internet-based information
resources are global in their scope, yet unevenly
distributed, as their availability is reliant on
access to necessary hardware, software and digi-
tal literacies. Hess and Ostrom (2003) suggest
that the term “subtractability” is more suitable
than the term “rivalry”. The latter term implies
a more binary characteristic of the resource in
question and a more antagonistic relationship
between commoners, while the term “subtracta-
bility” does not exclude the possibility of com-
moners sharing the resource in question more or
less equitably. Many of the contemporary digital
commons are—just like knowledge—neither
rival nor subtractable but to varying degrees
infinitely shareable. The information resources
themselves can thus not be regarded as scarce,
but there will still be a need to sustain and econ-
omise with other types of more “ephemeral”
resources such as conversational floor, attention,
enthusiasm, sense of commitment and responsi-
bility to the community etc. (Pargman, 2005). It
should be pointed out, however, that the crea-
tion of infinitely shareable digital resources still
requires the use of finite natural resources such
as minerals, metals, plastics for building the nec-
essary hardware, as well as fossil-fuelled cooling
systems for maintaining server rooms etc (Cubitt
et al., 2011; Hilty and Aebischer, 2015), as well
as complex sociotechnical assemblages to create
software and digital content. There is hence an
indispensable subtractable sociomaterial base in
place to support the creation and dissemination
of endlessly shareable knowledge resources.
In the early years of the internet, Kollock
(1996) commented on Ostrom’s principles in
relation to online communities, specifically the
graphical virtual community WorldsAway. He
argued that the first principle of defining clear
group boundaries is difficult to apply to the dig-
ital sphere, but that the third principle, i.e. that
users should be able to participate in modifying
the rules, is relevant for online communities.
The study object in this article is contem-
porary commons that are driven by a will to
democratise access to resources, be it infor-
mation, tools, space or social support, i.e.
making these resources more widely accessi-
ble to people by not requiring monetary con-
tributions or direct exchange (Benkler, 2006;
Rifkin, 2014). The overall goal of these com-
mons is to make it easy for people to cooper-
ate and solve common problems, empowering
and making people less dependent on cor-
porate and/or state power. This ethos differs
slightly from Ostrom’s (1990) analysis, which
was centered around how natural resource
commons can be long-enduring in order to
continue to sustain the communities that are
dependent on them.
Another difference is that many contem-
porary commons are situated in more urban
contexts—like community gardens, cultural
urban spaces, maker spaces etc.—where the
users are not a tight-knit community that
is reliant on the resource for their subsist-
ence in the same way as in Ostrom’s natural
resource commons. Moreover, the growth of
digital platforms has also enabled coordi-
nation of temporary physical “pop-up com-
mons”, i.e. resources that are privately owned
but are temporarily transformed into a
commons, like parking places that are tem-
porarily transformed into parks for a day,
ride sharing platforms turning private vehi-
cles into temporary commons etc. (Bradley,
2015). Given these shifting characteristics of
contemporary commons, there is a need to
develop theorisation and design principles
to support them.
Three cases of contemporary
commons: the Bike Kitchen, Hoffice
and Wikipedia
In contrast to Ostrom’s natural resource com-
mons, here illustrated with the case of grazing
land for cows, we chose three cases of what we
call 21st century commons. These have been
chosen so that they illustrate commons rang-
ing from the analogue localised resource to
235
Bradley and Pargman
the urban digitally enabled commons and the
entirely digital global non-rival commons.
Our first example of a 21st century commons
is the Bike Kitchen, a non-profit DIY bike
repair studio concept. Our analysis is based
on four interviews with initiators and users at
the Bike Kitchens in Malmö and Gothenburg
during 2014 and 2015 and on-site observations
on three occasions. These Bike Kitchens are
part of a larger international network of bicy-
cle kitchens, or community bike repair shops/
bicycle collectives. Bike Kitchens appeared in
the late 1990s in Europe as well as in California,
and have since spread across the world, and
can now be found in cities as Buenos Aires,
Toronto, Tasmania, Minsk, Madrid, Dortmund
etc.1 The initiators of the Malmö Bike Kitchen,
which was the first in Sweden when it opened in
2011, were inspired by the Los Angeles Bicycle
Kitchen, and Malmö has since become a source
of inspiration for other Swedish cities wishing
to open their own Bike Kitchens.
The Bike Kitchen is an open DIY repair
workshop, where anyone can come to fix their
bike or build a bike from recycled spare parts.
Tools are available, as are volunteers that can
help, but the idea is that ordinary users should
Figure 1.  The outdoor premises of the Malmö Bike Kitchen. Photo by Karin Bradley.
236
help each other, thus building a spirit of collec-
tive learning and culture of sharing of space,
tools and knowledge (Johnson, 2014). The
Bike Kitchens also serve as recycling centers
for abandoned bikes. Citizens, the police, hous-
ing associations or local businesses donate old
bikes or spare parts which people can use free
of charge.
Bike Kitchens are run on a non-profit basis,
generally by volunteers, and focus on spreading
bike repair skills to citizens. A central idea of the
Bike Kitchen is that it is accessible and welcom-
ing to all, particularly people with little finan-
cial means (Johnson, 2014; Luna, 2012). The
Malmö Bike Kitchen is managed by volunteers
and a couple of part-time paid workers funded
by a non-profit foundation. The Gothenburg
Bike Kitchen is entirely run by volunteers,
who alternate responsibility for managing the
facility every month. The Bike Kitchens in
Gothenburg and Malmö are managed as mem-
bership organisations, but they charge a very
low annual fee of 5 and 10 Euros respectively,
per year. Non-members may use the facilities as
well, but are encouraged to become members
if they make frequent use of the facilities. The
Gothenburg Bike Kitchen receives funding for
 The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century
its premises and is run in cooperation with an
educational non-profit foundation.2 The Malmö
Bike Kitchen (Figure  1) has received funding
from a non-profit foundation and some limited
financial support from the municipality.3 The
idea is to keep rules simple and easily readable
on walls at the sites: this is a DIY repair/build
workspace, give help to others and feel free to
borrow tools and use spare parts.
The Bike Kitchen is an open concept
that can be copied and taken up by anyone.
Experiences from managing bike kitchens
and tips for people who want to set up a new
one are exchanged via forums such as the
Bike Collectives Network, regional network-
ing projects (Cykelköket, 2013), online articles
(Johnson, 2014) and Wikis.4 The Bike Kitchen
serves here as an example of a localised physi-
cal commons, often situated in urban areas, but
formulated as a concept with certain principles
(not-for-profit, DIY, reuse, sharing of spaces,
tools and skills, volunteer-run, community
building around bike transportation), which
can be adapted to fit local circumstances, access
to spaces and funding. Thus it bears a resem-
blance to other physical commons like maker
spaces, tool libraries or community gardens.
Our second example is Hoffice, an open con-
cept for arranging temporary “home offices”,
i.e. a set of principles for transforming a pri-
vate kitchen table into a one-day shared office
space.5 Hoffice was started in 2014 by a small
group of Stockholm-based friends who were
self-employed social entrepreneurs and who
both enjoyed and suffered from the fact that
their work lives were characterised by much
freedom and little structure. While loving
their work, many social entrepreneurs who
work from home or a coffee shop miss out
on important aspects of work life, e.g. lack of
workmates, lack of a separate workspace and,
not least, a lack of self-discipline. Hoffice aims
to solve these problems by creating shared
values out of under-utilised resources, most
notably someone’s kitchen table, thereby creat-
ing a type of commons out of thin air. Anyone
joining the Hoffice Facebook group can offer
up their kitchen table as a gift in the shape of
a free “pop-up” temporary office (commons)
for a day (by providing information about the
number of available seats, address etc.). Other
Hoffice members can then book a seat in that
temporary office-for-a-day. While Hoffice was
restricted to purely being a Stockholm phe-
nomenon during 2014, the simple structure and
ease of replication, combined with increased
media coverage, led to an explosive spread in
the concept during 2015. There are currently
Hoffice groups on five different continents,
and in 50 European cities. Hoffice events are
easily set up and coordinated with the help of
low-cost digital technologies—each Hoffice
group is currently organised through a separate
Facebook group.
Hoffice is more than a scheme for efficient
use of under-utilised “office spaces”, however.
It was founded with inspiration from Gandhian
thought, Buddhist philosophy, the secular Sri
Lankan Sarvodaya6 movement’s ideas about
gift economies and more modern ideas about
“collective intelligence” (Lévy, 1997). Offering
up one’s home as a temporary workspace for
others can be seen as a pure gift; the host can-
not expect to get anything back except friend-
ship and company. Correspondingly, the guest
cannot set any particular demands on the host
or the workspace. A number of principles pro-
vide a structure for organising the day, in order
to ensure that a sizable amount of work is per-
formed at a Hoffice event while still providing
an appealing and supportive social environ-
ment. Work shifts (usually 45 minutes of man-
dated silence) are followed by 5–10 minutes
of recuperation and a social/physical exercise
(stretching, dancing, breathing exercise, cof-
fee break etc.). Work shifts are also preceded
by participants stating what they will work on
and are followed up by reporting back on work
performed. This constitutes a pledge of sorts
and the group can thus also provide social
and emotional support, as well as a structure
to ensure that the time is used productively.
237
Bradley and Pargman
The possibility to meet new people and extend
personal networks is attractive to many par-
ticipants (not least to self-employed freelanc-
ers and social entrepreneurs). There is much
experimentation going on with the Hoffice
format itself (outdoor meetings, meetings on
a boat or with specific themes, e.g. web devel-
opment, creative writing etc.). The analysis
of Hoffice in this article is based on having
attended Hoffice meetings in Stockholm dur-
ing 2014 and 2015 (Figure  2), hosting a few
Hoffice events and holding lengthy conversa-
tions with the founder of the Hoffice concept
in 2014.
Hoffice serves here as an example of tem-
porary, pop-up commons, similarly to the “res-
taurants at home” or peer-to-peer ride sharing
concepts, where a private space is temporarily
turned into a commons, a process which has
become more easy to organise with the spread
of digital technologies.
The third example is Wikipedia, serving as an
example of an entirely digital commons with a
global reach. The basic service that Wikipedia
provides is well known; it is the largest and
most popular encyclopaedia in the world, with
Figure 2.  A Hoffice in Stockholm, 2016. Photo by Daniel Pargman.
238
more than 12.5 billion page views per month.
There are currently official Wikipedias in 290
different languages and while the majority of
these are relatively limited (e.g. containing
10,000 or fewer articles), together they contain
more than 35 million articles.7 There are twelve
different languages with more than one million
articles each.
One of the greatest strengths and weak-
nesses of Wikipedia is that anyone can
become an editor,8 and there are currently
more than 70,000 contributors who regu-
larly edit Wikipedia. With such a large editor
base, there are also a number of higher levels
of authority, e.g. “editors in good standing”
who have more privileges than ordinary edi-
tors, “administrators” who can delete articles
or edit protected articles, “bureaucrats” who
can add or remove administrative rights, an
“Arbitration Committee” that deals with con-
flicts and “stewards” with complete access to
the wiki and the ability to change all other
users’ rights. A  2008 article (Butler et  al.,
2008) that examines and compares different
perspectives on the role of policies and rules
in Wikipedia bears the telling name “Don’t
 The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century
look now, but we’ve created a bureaucracy”.
While Wikipedia strives to be egalitarian,
open and transparent (and of course above
all to present correct information in its arti-
cles), the sheer size of the project is a chal-
lenge to the governance structure and there
is thus “continuing experimentation with
approaches to community-self-regulation”
(Bruns, 2008, p.  140). Some argue that “ad
hoc meritocracies” like Wikipedia “are at risk
of transforming themselves into more inflex-
ible hierarchies” (Kostakis, 2010). Others
propose that it is more or less inevitable that
peer production projects such as Wikipedia
will become increasingly oligarchic as they
grow (Shaw and Hill, 2014). Our analysis of
Wikipedia is based on several years of fre-
quent use and of occasionally editing arti-
cles, but primarily on published research on
Wikipedia, e.g. the above-mentioned sources.
Our three cases of 21st century commons
can be interpreted as representing different
categories of commons: a localised physical
urban commons that is part of a wider inter-
national network, a temporary pop-up com-
mons enabled by digital technologies, and
an entirely digital and global commons. The
initiators of The Bike Kitchen and Hoffice
have not themselves theorised these enti-
ties as commons, whereas Wikipedia is often
referred to as an example of a digital com-
mons (Bollier, 2007). Given their fundamen-
tal differences, our ambition is not to develop
design principles that could be relevant for
all of these (and other) cases, but rather to
use these cases to deepen understanding of
the diverse nature and organisational struc-
ture of contemporary commons. We do this
through constructing a typology of the differ-
ent commons (Table  1) and comparing them
against Ostrom’s design principles (Table  2).
Our article can thus serve as a basis for future
work on developing support structures for
contemporary commons, as part of the wider
sharing economy.
Towards a typology of commons
What are then the similarities and differences
between Ostrom’s natural resource commons,
e.g. grazing land, and the three cases of 21st
century commons described above? In Table 1,
we present a typology that characterises these
different types of commons by responding to
questions in terms of the nature of the com-
mon resource and how it is being managed and
governed.
The first question concerns what resource
is being shared. This varies from grazing land,
i.e. a subtractable natural resource, to shared
premises, tools, spare parts and skills in the case
of the Bike Kitchen and a temporary work-
space in the case of Hoffice, i.e. a kitchen table
in somebody’s home and the social structures
and atmosphere created around co-working.
The latter two include human-made physi-
cal resources and human-made non-physical
resources such as skills and social support.
In the case of Wikipedia, the resource being
shared is information, i.e. a human-made, non-
physical and infinitely sharable resource. All
the resources being shared have, however, been
built up by innumerable hours of work, inter-
personal relations and trust-building, together
with the physical resources needed to enable
the commons, such as the metals and hardware
of the computers used to build Wikipedia, the
materiality of the tools and physical space of
the Bike Kitchen and the rent-paying and
home-making of the Hoffice events.
The second question deals with who can
access the resource and barriers to entry and
exit for accessing the resource in question. In
the case of the grazing land, local villagers and
their cows can access the resource. The barriers
to entry are intentionally kept high, i.e. users
need to become part of the community, which
traditionally would be through kinship. Barriers
to exit are also high as opportunities for leav-
ing the community and creating a new life else-
where could be limited. The Bike Kitchen is very
different, as anyone can access the resources in
239
240
Table 1.  Typology of commons ranging from natural resources to entirely digital resources
1. What resource
2. Who can access
(barriers to entry/exit)
3. Degree of subtractability
4. Dependence on the
resource
5. What rules
6. Control of compliance
with rules
7. Who sets or changes the
rules for governing?
Grazing land (Ostrom)
Natural resource
Community
(high barriers to entry/low
to exit)
High
High
No more grazing cows in
summer than can be kept in
winter
Monitoring system, graduated
sanctions, means for dispute
resolution
The local community
members
Bike kitchen
Shared premises, tools, spare
parts and skills
Anyone
(easy entry, keep from exit)
Low for physical resources;
negative for collaborative
learning
Low but varying
DIY and helping others
Informal social control
Open concept with general
principles, local initiators or
volunteers decide local rules
Hoffice
Temporary co-working
space, i.e. physical and social
space
Group access
(easy entry, easy exit)
High for seats but low for
number of events
Medium but varying
Abide by Hoffice/host local
rules
Informal social control
Part of an umbrella concept,
but hosts decide local rules
Bradley and Pargman
Wikipedia
Information
Anyone
(unnoticeable entry/exit)
Non-existent or negative,
Medium but varying
Open to all, but requiring
digital access
Norms, rules and sophisticated
software tools
Board of the Wikimedia
Foundation

Table 2.  Applicability of Ostrom’s design principles to the 21st century commons
Ostrom’s design principles for natural resource
commons
1. Define clear group boundaries
2. Match rules governing use of common goods
to local needs and conditions
3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can
participate in modifying the rules
4. M
 ake sure the rule­making rights of community
members are respected by outside authorities
5. Develop a system, implemented by community
members, for monitoring members’ behaviour
6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators
7. Provide accessible, low­cost means for dispute
resolution
question: locals and visitors, members and non-
members. The barriers to entry are designed to
be low, since the whole idea of the Bike Kitchen
is based on disseminating know-how and tools
for bicycling widely. The barriers to exit are
higher, however, as users are actively encour-
aged to return, but also to become members
and/or volunteers, since the common resource
is highly reliant on people contributing to main-
taining it. Hoffice is restricted to group access
(membership in a Facebook group) and users
need to book one of the limited number of
available seats at any specific Hoffice event.
The number of events and seats can easily be
multiplied, however, as anyone is free to host a
Hoffice event around their own kitchen table.
The barriers to entry and exit are intention-
ally kept low, as users can easily host or join a
Hoffice event, but can also easily exit—there is
no membership or commitment to be a repeat
user or host. In the case of Wikipedia, any-
one with internet access can freely access the
resource, and entry and exit is frictionless (oth-
ers do not notice a user’s entry and exit).
The third question concerns degree of sub-
tractability. Grazing land is highly subtractable
The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century
Applicability to our three cases of 21st century commons
Not particularly relevant, more important to keep barriers to entry low
Relevant for the Bike Kitchen and Hoffice, but not very relevant for
Wikipedia
Relevant for the Bike Kitchen and Hoffice, but less relevant for
Wikipedia given the distance between ordinary users, different levels of
editors and the board
Currently unproblematic and taken for granted for the Bike Kitchen,
Hoffice and Wikipedia
Not (yet) relevant for the Bike Kitchen and Hoffice. Relevant for
Wikipedia editors, but not users
Not (yet) relevant for the Bike Kitchen and Hoffice, perhaps relevant for
Wikipedia editors
Not (yet) relevant for the Bike Kitchen and Hoffice. Relevant for
Wikipedia editors
and for each cow that grazes the land, there will
be a little less left for the next cow. The com-
mon resources of The Bike Kitchen are less
subtractable. Spare parts are indeed highly sub-
tractable, but the shared space and the tools
will not diminish with others’ use. The social
resources in terms of skills sharing and col-
laborative learning are, however, “negatively
subtractable”, as they constitute resources that
increase in value when many users are present at
the same time. At some point, the space and the
tools can become less valuable if too many want
to use them simultaneously, creating crowding
and waiting. It is then however possible to cre-
ate another Bike Kitchen, although this requires
considerable physical and social resources.
Hoffice has both a high and low degree of
subtractability; there is a limited number of seats
available at each event, but new Hoffice events
can easily be created out of innumerable small or
large homes without the corresponding invest-
ments needed to create a more permanent com-
mon resource like a Bike Kitchen. It should be
noted that a potential bottleneck (“resource”)
is having the key individuals necessary to create
and maintain these commons, e.g. Hoffice hosts
241
Bradley and Pargman
and Bike Kitchen initiators and volunteers. The
creation of these types of human-made resources
partly differ from natural resources like grazing
land, which self-reproduces with enough time,
sun and rain. It should however be noted that
the longevity of many natural resources require
human caretakers as well; grazing land might be
overgrown if no humans see that cattle graze it.
For a digital resource like Wikipedia, the sub-
tractability is non-existent or even negative;
the resource does not diminish with more users,
but rather increases in value (Hess and Ostrom,
2005). Specific knowledge increases in value
the more widely it is circulated. The more peo-
ple that use Wikipedia, the higher the chances
that some users will become editors. With more
editors, the knowledge resource expands and, at
least in theory, improves. However, it should be
acknowledged that there are also problems with
the open collaborative production (errors, poor
editing, vandalism, disputes etc.), and therefore
various structures have been set up to handle
such problems (version and revision controls,
internal discussion forums, dispute resolution
processes etc.).
The fourth question deals with the degree to
which the users are dependent on the resource.
In the case of grazing land, the commoners are
highly dependent on the resource for their sub-
sistence. In the case of the Bike Kitchen, the
users are less dependent on the resource. For
some it can be socially important and/or for oth-
ers a way of serving transportation needs in a
low-cost way. The dependence on Hoffice varies.
It can perform an important role for some regu-
lar users as a way of getting work done in a much
more socially agreeable and effective manner.
For others it can simply be more of a fun expe-
rience. The dependence on Wikipedia varies
between users. Some use it every day in their job
or education and others use it occasionally, but
few are entirely reliant on it for their subsistence.
The fifth question concerns the rules for using
the resource. In the example of grazing land,
the core rule is that the commoners are only
allowed to have as many cows grazing on the
242
summer meadows as they can keep indoors dur-
ing the winter. Being a DIY repair studio, the
basic rule of the Bike Kitchen is that users can
borrow tools to work on a bike but are expected
to help others when present. There are also
other implicit rules, like putting the tools back
in order, leaving when the space closes etc. If
a user becomes a volunteer, they also need to
follow a schedule and do certain tasks, such as
maintaining the spaces in order, opening and
closing the space. Users at a Hoffice event need
to follow the working rules (45-minute silent
work shifts etc.) as well as the host’s local rules
on how the space may be used (as a guest in
their home). Wikipedia has no rules set up for
usage, but has a set of (over time progressively
more specific) guidelines and rules for editors
on how to make or edit an entry (many formal-
ised in the Wikipedia Manual of Style9), how
to provide sources, how to write from a neutral
point of view etc.
The sixth question concerns the control
of rules being followed. In Ostrom’s natu-
ral resource commons, the design principles
include a system of monitoring that is car-
ried out by the community members, gradu-
ated sanctions for rule violations and low-cost
means for dispute resolution. In the cases of the
Bike Kitchen and Hoffice, the rules are upheld
through informal social control and anyone
who does not follow the rules is instructed by
others, but there are currently no sanctions for
rule violators (see further below). In the case of
Wikipedia there is no need to control ordinary
users, but there are norms and rules for editors
and for discussion forums, and sophisticated
software tools to keep track of changes.
The seventh and last question concerns who
sets and changes the rules for governing the
resource. For grazing land, it is the community
members of the village who set and change
the rules collectively. A  core principle of suc-
cessfully governing common-pool resources
is that those affected by the rules are part of
the decision-making process. In the case of the
Bike Kitchen, the specific local rules are set and
 The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century
changed by the initiators/key individuals or by
volunteers. However, the general principles of
Bike Kitchens, i.e. being non-profit, built on
DIY and collaborative learning, are not rules
but rather a tradition and an international con-
text in which the specific local Bike Kitchen
operates. In a similar way, Hoffice has general
principles that can be modified and adapted
to local conditions by the host. The rules for
Wikipedia are set, and changed, by the board of
its governing body, the Wikimedia Foundation.
Taken together, it is clear that the charac-
teristics and rules of these commons differ in
several respects, implying that Ostrom’s set of
design principles for successful common-pool
resource institutions needs to be rethought and
adapted with these differences in mind.
Design principles of 21st century
commons?
We return here to Ostrom’s (1990) design prin-
ciples and discuss how they relate to our three
cases of 21st century commons. One important
difference between natural resource commons
and 21st century commons is that the latter often
have two distinct groups of members; contribu-
tors (or “managers”, e.g. volunteers, hosts, edi-
tors) and ordinary users (guests, visitors). In the
case of natural resource commons, it is instead
often the case that users (members) also man-
age and monitor the commons and vice versa.
In Table 2, Ostrom’s seven principles are com-
mented upon. It can be seen that some of them
are not directly applicable to our cases and that
other principles apply to managers, but not to
ordinary users. It would be desirable to develop
modified sets of design principles for successful
21st century institutions, but here we can only
contribute reflections on factors relevant to
consider when formulating such principles.
The commons are all reliant on human care-
takers, however, the 21st century commons
analysed here are particularly dependent on
key persons—initiators, hosts and contributors.
In the three cases of 21st century commons, the
barriers to entry are hence made low and new-
comers are welcome and encouraged to join
and to contribute at various levels. A  crucial
factor is how to recruit and motivate enough
people to create and maintain the resource in
question. The 21st century commons also have
intentionally low barriers to entry because of
their low (or even negative) subtractability.
Another important challenge is therefore to
“convert” at least some of the users into active
contributors (hosts, volunteers, editors etc.).
Unlike Ostrom’s natural resource commons,
contributing to our cases of 21st century com-
mons means less of a life-long commitment.
However, a certain degree of commitment is
necessary for a facility to work; for example,
in the case of the Bike Kitchen, if volunteers
do not keep their commitment to open up the
facility according to a schedule, the resource
will deteriorate. It is therefore important that
there are welcoming, simple and clear contribu-
tor interfaces for volunteers, hosts and editors.
The digital interfaces of Wikipedia and Hoffice
play an important role in this, whereas the spe-
cific local volunteer Bike Kitchen system needs
to be simple to join and attractive enough to
encourage users to remain. An important fac-
tor for disseminating a concept is that it is
clearly communicated and easy to replicate and
adapted to local conditions. This is the case for
Hoffice and Wikipedia, e.g. the process of start-
ing a Wikipedia in a new language.
The three 21st century commons we describe
here are all mission driven but were founded on
three different ideas: to democratise access to
low-cost bicycling and repair, to use under-uti-
lised assets while simultaneously building a cul-
ture of trust and generosity, and to democratise
access to information beyond the money-based
economy. In line with Benkler’s (2006) analysis
of commons-based peer production in the digi-
tal sphere, these three contemporary collabora-
tive commons can be viewed as embodying a
postcapitalist ethic, i.e. the resources in question
are produced for use, rather than for exchange
value, are produced by peers, rather than in
243
Bradley and Pargman
hierarchical command structures, and are based
on an ethic of sharing and common ownership,
rather than competition and private property.
In Ostrom’s examples of natural resource
commons, the commoners are invariably highly
reliant on the resource in question for their
subsistence and their very livelihood, whereas
the contributors and users of the 21st century
commons are not nearly as dependent on these
commons. The 21st century commoners are not
forced to get along with each other no matter
what and people who do not like the way that
Hoffice, the Bike Kitchen or Wikipedia is gov-
erned will find that it relatively easy to simply
leave, rather than to conform or struggle to
change the rules (Hirschman, 1970).
It is notable (see Table  2) that neither the
Bike Kitchen nor Hoffice—unlike Wikipedia
and Ostrom’s natural resource commons—have
systems for monitoring members’ behaviour,
graduated sanctions for rule violators or low-
cost means for dispute resolution. One explana-
tion is that these organisations are still “young”
commons that have not yet encountered many
crises. They are also still relatively small, there
is a high degree of trust between members
and they are to a high extent still governed by
benevolent norms that dictate suitable behav-
iour and assume well-behaved participants. It
may be the case that these commons efforts
experience future crises from which they will
evolve or to which they will succumb. Stone
(1995) tells the story of CommuniTree, the first
(1978) online bulletin board system (BBS) that
aimed to foster (technical) discussions but also
to create an online community. An idealistic
ethos that assumed the best of each participant
was an intrinsic part of the very software code
at the heart of the system. Unfortunately, this
made it impossible to reprogramme (“defend”)
the system a few years later, when high school
students started to use new school comput-
ers and modems to connect to, sabotage and
desecrate CommuniTree. After a few months
of being assaulted by “the barbarian hordes”,
CommuniTree was closed down, but some
244
participants took the lessons to heart and
developed new BBS systems “…with perhaps
less visionary character but [that] allowed mon-
itoring and disconnection of “troublesome”
participants” (Stone, 1995, p. 117).
More mature commons such as Wikipedia
and long-enduring natural resource commons
(where whole livelihoods are at stake) will
have successfully survived series of disrup-
tions and crises and will to a higher extent be
characterised by rules that include an “...or else”
statement, e.g. that specifies punishments for
rule-breakers (Conway, 2014). Anthropologist
Victor Turner argues that the relations between
members in spontaneous counter-movements
(“communitas”) “can seldom be maintained
for very long. […] and it is the fate of all spon-
taneous communitas in history to undergo
what most people see as a ‘decline and fall’ into
structure and law” (Turner, 1996 [1969], p. 132).
While idealism and a sense of community is
essential to the development of new commons,
the true success of such human-made resource
commons may only be proven after they have
been in existence for some time and have sur-
vived and evolved beyond the goodwill that
often fuels the initial enthusiasm. Both natural
and human-made resource commons can be
degraded and a balance must be found over
time that weighs the positive and spontane-
ous forces that create or renew the resources
in question against the need to protect these
resources from abuse.
Conclusions
This article shows that contemporary com-
mons, situated in a globalised, urbanised and
digitalised context, differ from traditional natu-
ral resource commons in several ways: in terms
of the character of the resource being shared,
what exactly is ‘scarce’, barriers to entry and
exit, reliance on the resource and how rules are
formulated and upheld.
Some of Ostrom’s design principles for long-
enduring governance of commons are still
 The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century
relevant, for example, ensuring that the rules
that govern use of the commons are matched
with local needs and conditions and that com-
moners affected by the rules can participate in
modifying them. However, in these localised and
well-demarcated commons, commoners have
dual roles; they both benefit from and uphold
(care, manage, monitor) the commons. In con-
trast, with the 21st century commons analysed
here, there is a (sometimes relatively stark) dif-
ference between ordinary “users” and contribu-
tors (volunteers, editors, hosts) who are essential
for building and taking care of the human-made
commons. In the latter commons, it is primarily
human engagement that constitutes the scarce
resource and that needs to be cultivated and
cared for. Therefore it is important to have clear
contributor-interfaces and simple systems that
potential contributors can plug into, yet that
are also possible to adjust, making contributors
want to continue to develop the collaborative
work. However, in order for a commons regime
to survive crises and recruit new users and con-
tributors, it is important that the commoners
are closely attached to the commons, that the
commons is not simply a hobby but somehow
becomes part of the commoners’ lives, or per-
haps even their livelihoods. This feeds into the
ongoing debate about the future of the shar-
ing economy, with Scholz (2016) and Gorenflo
(2015) calling for the development of “plat-
form co-operativism”, where sharing platforms
are turned into cooperative structures where
the former platform ‘users’ also become own-
ers and decision-makers and gain parts of their
livelihood from the platform. This is a reaction
against the global contemporary for-profit shar-
ing economy platforms, which build on peer-to-
peer production and sharing of resources, whilst
the expansion of the platforms primarily benefit
the corporate shareholders, and to little extent
the millions of users who in fact “build” the con-
tent of the platform.
Bauwens (2014) has argued for the impor-
tance of development of semi-centralised for-
benefit forms of collaborative economy, i.e.
not only growth of the myriad of decentralised
collaborative commons such as community
gardens, Bike Kitchens, local food coopera-
tives, Time Banks, etc., but also more general
structures that can enable for-benefit collabo-
rative economies to scale up and seriously
compete with the mainstream market alterna-
tives. Wikipedia is in fact one such example of a
for-benefit centralised commons that has gone
from the margins to the mainstream. However,
much needs to happen before a contemporary
commons like the Bike Kitchen becomes a
standard option for fixing users’ main means of
transportation. However, a first step in devel-
oping scalable for-benefit collaborative struc-
tures is to understand the characteristics of the
diverse commons they are built upon, which is
where our contribution lies.
End Notes
1
http://www.bikecollectives.org/wiki/index.
php?title=Community_Bicycle_Organisations
[Accessed 11 November 2015].
2
h tt p : / / w w w. cy ke l ko ke t . o rg / o m cy ke l ko ke t /
omcykelkoket.html [Accessed 9 November 2015].
3
The Bike Kitchen has had 3-year project funding
from Allmänna Arvsfonden, a Swedish foundation
gathering the inheritances from people without close
relatives, and set-period financial support from the
City of Malmö, which ended in 2015.
4
See The Bike Collectives website http://www.bike-
collectives.org/ and their Wiki http://www.bikecollec-
tives.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page [Accessed
11 November 2015].
5
http://hoffice.nu/en/ [Accessed 11 November 2015].
See http://www.sarvodaya.org/about [Accessed 11
6
November 2015].
7
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
[Accessed 11 November 2015].
8
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
A b o u t # S t r e n g t h s. 2 C _ w e a k n e s s e s. 2 C _ a n d _
article_quality_in_Wikipedia [Accessed 11
November 20 15].
9
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
Manual_of_Style [Accessed 2 November 2015].
245
Bradley and Pargman
Acknowledgements
The research conducted for this article is part of the
project Urban Sharing—The rise of collaborative
consumption and co-use of spaces, funded by the
Swedish Research Council Formas, grant number
2012–641. We are thankful for valuable comments
from two anonymous reviewers as well as the Editors.
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