Kortrijk as a ‘commons city’

Commons Lab is structurally collaborating with Vives Hogeschool since 2023 (thanks to Michel Bauwens and Henk Vandaele). We give lectures to students and teachers International Social Work, Social-Cultural Work, Diaconical Sciences and Applied Psychology about ‘commons transition’. We try to develop new pedagogic and didactic material about the commons to share and use all over Flanders. During spring 2023, an interdisciplinary group of students made a Bachelor's thesis project: investigating the city of Kortrijk as a commons.

By doing exploratory research about common initiatives, the aim was to get more general information about common initiatives in the city and the region of Kortrijk. Because a lot of them only have less information on their websites and interviewing all of them would have been too time consuming, a survey was used. The survey was used to get more general information such as the target group, funding, challenges, and collaborations of the commons. Even though a survey is normally used as a quantitative method, it was used to get qualitative input from various common initiatives in our case.

Interviews

To guarantee the depth of the research, it was decided to add the qualitative method of conducting interviews with different people who are active in the field of commons. Although the initial assignment was to interview five commons, it was decided to do six in-depth interviews. The decision to undertake additional interviews was made due to the presence of highly captivating commons. It would have been regrettable to confine the research solely to five of the identified common initiatives.

Social experiment in a common sense

After getting to know more about the topic of commons, the bachelor group thought about doing not only the informal meeting and the portraits for a public action, but also a social experiment in a common sense. This social experiment was predominantly for young people between the ages of 18 to 25, even though the bachelor group wanted to include as many different actors as possible.

To spread the concept of commons further than only in the city and surrounding area of Kortrijk, it was tried to include a wide range of students in Kortrijk. Using the idea of introducing a wider public to the concept of commons through a small gathering with music, the research group wanted to spread more awareness for common sense and a try-out of a non-capitalistic event. Furthermore, the common concept of “Bring and Share” should be introduced to the attending people. For the location of the event ‘Kortrijk Weide’ was chosen. It is a spacious grass meadow free for everybody with some benches and a large covered fireplace area.

Informal meeting

The final action of the bachelor project was planning and carrying out an informal meeting. Focus on this is to network, get to know other commons, initiatives and politicians, exchange experiences and get some new ideas from each other to grow as an initiative or individual.

The goal for this meeting was to think about solutions and give policy recommendations for the city of Kortrijk.

Documents

Free download final report ‘Kortrijk as a common city: onderzoeksrapport_Kortrijk-as-a-common-city.pdf