The Common City Manifesto

1. The fourth pillar, the common city, requires shifting as many urban resources and assets as possible into common ownership.

2. Municipalities need to recover full control over city planning, and implement a pro-citizen, socially just approach to all urban development.

3. Mechanisms are required to facilitate broad and meaningful citizen input into, scrutiny over, and management of, major city decisions especially around the allocation of resources and land.

4. Vacant and derelict land, especially in corporate land banks, needs reallocating to community owned organisations.

5. Shifts in taxation from income to land is required to break up historically high levels of unequal land ownership.

6. The role of the local state becomes enabler and facilitator of community and citizen led initiatives that can unlock inclusion, ecological restoration and local wealth building.

7. Commonly owned institutions, worker owned co-operatives and complementary money systems are required to capture and recirculate value and build community wealth.

8. The mass release and use of data is required to empower communities to engage with, and steer, local development.

9. New measures and metrics based on happiness, wellbeing and sustainability are required that can shift priorities away from business as usual economic growth.

10. Learning and research programmes and paid work release will facilitate broad engagement with community based activities.

11. Citizen movements that undertake civil disobedience and direct action will play a vital role in highlighting shortcomings of established legal and democratic processes and priority areas for action.