Presentation short abstract

Grass-roots proto planning, based on commons and social movements, offer an alternative to state-centric vision of planning. Industrial commons such as distributed production networks, community fabrication hubs, and socially integrated factories are explored as examples.

Presentation long abstract

Existing theories of democratic economic planning focus on state-lead planning. As such, they identify emergent forms of planning in top-down structures, like the state planning capacities of the “Secrétariat général à la planification écologique” in the work of Durand and Keucheyan, or the corporate planning capabilities of firms like Amazon or Walmart in the work of Phillips and Rozworkski. This reflects a vision of planning concerned with the capacity to direct and control the economy along non-market principles. However, if we instead conceptualize planning as primarily a question of creating capacities for self-governance and aligning production with social needs, we identify different existing practices as sites of inspiration for planning systems and as vectors of political transformation.

Drawing on the literature on the commons as well as workers councils and council communism, this paper proposes a concept of "grass-roots proto-planning structures" as a category of social practices which lay the foundation for self-governance and production based on needs. These proto planning structures may exist in a variety of forms. This paper explores the form of "commons based manufacturing": projects which organize the production of manufactured goods based on shared, collectively governed resources. Three elements of industrial commons ecosystems are identified, drawing on empirical examples: the distributed production network, the community fabrication hub, and the socially integrated factory.