Access to secure housing is a basic requirement for human dignity, and yet millions of people are under the threat of eviction. Amidst the global housing crisis, there has been an emergence of social movements defying the hegemonic concept of individualistic property rights. The discussion around the urban commons is in line with this struggle. Thailand’s slum upgrading program, Bann Mankong, is a great example of practising collective rights over land and housing. Starting from 2003 with ten pilot projects, Bann Mankong has scaled up successfully to 1,231 projects covering 112,777 households as of 2019. Impressed by its success, a lot of literature on Bann Mankong tried to extract lessons on how to replicate the model elsewhere. However, while it stresses its applicability, less has been discussed about the country-specific context of Thailand, which gave birth to this program. Similarly, the focus on the participatory aspect of the program diluted the fact that Bann Mankong is a government-initiated and funded program and the very nature of the CODI, the operating agency of the program, is a government organisation, even if it adopted the flexibility of NGOs. Guided by Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development framework and Bookchin’s confederal governance, the dissertation identified the hierarchical elements of Bann Mankong’s organisational structure. Also, the dissertation analysed the socio-economic and cultural context around the institution which enabled the emergence of a state-initiated commoning process like Bann Mankong; the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in Thailand, the notion of ‘sufficiency economy’ combined with Buddhism, the long-held history of public control over land, and grassroots movements. Lastly, the dissertation outlined the limitations of Bann Mankong in terms of inclusivity, financial sustainability, and gender equality. Especially regarding gender equality, the dissertation illuminated how voluntary labour in creating and managing the urban commons is gendered and underappreciated.

A description of the work (Abstract): «Exploring a potential vision of the common good for London’s economic centres, this dissertation asks why and how economic democracy should be enacted at the scale of the high street. While COVID-19 has exacerbated inequalities along many lines, evolving values around community, wellbeing and public space also pose an opportunity for re-imagining fairer economic trajectories through a focus on place. Often magnifying wider economic issues, the long-run decline of British high streets has been well documented. While commonly focusing on curation and design as a way to ‘activate’ these once public spaces, their complexity has given way to an equally diverse discourse lacking a consistent framework for guiding planning, interventions and policy. While current high street rhetoric offers a growing focus on social value and ‘community-led development’, economic power and equity implications are frequently overlooked. This thesis suggests, given the accessible and inclusive nature of high streets, the potential for situating a framework of economic development that considers a more radical restructuring of social and economic power. Placing the principles of economic democracy within an everyday site helps to foreground people and place. Through repurposing urban space for inclusive, collective and participatory workspaces, services or social centres, high streets can play a role in reformulating value concepts. Developing an analytical framework that considers rights, ownership and deliberation, through iterative empirical analysis, this thesis will address practices that could re-frame high streets to better serve their communities. SHORT: study asking why and how should a framework of economic democracy be used to re-shape london’s high streets, for the redistribution of economic power and the promotion of the common good.