The 'Forum Life Freedom Community', a research community established within the Forest and Sharing Foundation, edits the papers presented at the forum every year and publishes the Life Freedom Community Series.
In 2020, we published our first book, 『Questions for a New Era of the Life-Freedom Community』, followed by 『Questions of Transition, Transition of Questions (2021)』 and 『Politics of Transition, Ten Perspectives (2022)』. Last year, we published 『Climate Crisis, at the Crossroads of Transition (2023)』.
The title of the fifth series is “Redrawing the Commons (2024).”
As the title suggests, this series deals with the 'commons'.


The ten essays in this book seek to understand the commons, an emerging alternative discourse, from various perspectives.
How can we approach the commons? What do we see when we add the word "commons" to reality? And how can we think about the commons in a new way?

Through the example of 'Transition Village Eunpyeong,' the community women who participated in the urban garden shared ecological sensitivity through the 'act' of farming and ecological values ​​through contact with nature... This urban women's community with such an ecological orientation can be said to be flexible, open, and still experimental.

--- p.21

Han Sallim is a movement that maintains the boundaries of 'us' while forming and reconstructing commons that go beyond them, and creating a world where all life can survive.

--- p.87

Through a case study of a Peruvian peasant community that has undergone internal and external changes in the process of constant interaction with the external society, we consider the meaning of the “(fluid) us” discussed in the commons theory.

--- p.97

The commons is not a closed space for common beings or a no man's land open to all beings with nothing in common, but a place created through the process of overlapping, encountering, and intertwining the paths of moving beings.
As a space between, the commons begins by leaving ‘room’.

--- p.319

In the commons beyond the human, non-humans will not be summoned to fulfill human needs, but will live in spaces that have been considered human, visit them, or respond to human invitations.

--- p.145~146

Rather than focusing on deep ecology, I understand the planetary perspective to encompass Earth-world systems theory. This is because I want to emphasize that the human world's problem of worsening working conditions for delivery riders due to extreme heat is linked to the climate crisis and the threat to the survival of beings beyond humans due to the logic of construction-oriented real estate development.

--- p.173

In the competition surrounding the energy transition path, the commons is (re)formed through activities that resist the exclusive ownership or monopoly of specific resources and (re)arrange them within the relationship of common (ours) and public (everyone's).

--- p.189

Energy commons can truly function well and realize its value when it actively leverages the market.
...
The energy commons concept, which excludes marketization, fails to reflect the current trends in the electric power industry and overlooks the technical and physical conditions for integrating distributed, variable renewable energy into the power system.

--- p.231

The overlap or overlapping of different understandings and values ​​regarding objects that are established differently in each social system, that is, how to understand the commonalities of the systems, is at the core of the discussion on commons, including the discussion on the Gyeongui Line Commons.

--- p.287~288

The concept of commons is controversial.
That doesn't mean the concept of commons is still vague.
Rather, it means that people in various locations have different desires to call the commons, and the social realities that lead to them.
...
(Therefore) the commons should not be defined through any value orientation that is attached to it.
Rather, we can explain the various commons that exist in reality by focusing on a general form that can contain such diverse value orientations.

--- p.364