The Cooling the Commons Pattern Deck

Cities are made up of many different parts that have developed over time.  Social practices, cultures, built forms and natural spaces all shape how we live, interact and experience everyday life. Our pattern deck helps to make this complexity easier to understand in design terms. It shows what features support people to live well in a hotter world, and what is standing in the way. By understanding the design of cool commons, we can make better decisions about how to improve or expand the conditions for living well together.  

The pattern deck includes simple actions you can try today, those that involve working with others as well as plants and landscapes, and longer-term changes that require lobbying governments and organisations for support. Each pattern represents the key arrangements between built forms, natural systems and social practices that support commons-based cooling. We learned these patterns by observing, talking to and working with many different communities as part of our action research over the last decade.  

Through this work we also discovered problems in how cities are adapting to heat. Some patterns are maladaptive – they make things worse rather than better. We call these anti-patterns and bringing them to light will help us to avoid continuing harmful practices. The pattern format is informed by the Commons Identikit. This kit was invented by JK Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy in their book Take Back the Economy to helps us recognise and understand the different elements that make up a commons.  These key elements include:

Access: who can use this commons and for whom is access limited?

Use: What activities are preferred, and who manages them?  

Benefit: Who benefits from this commons? 

Care: Who cleans, repairs, or maintains this commons? 

Responsibility: Who sets the rules and ensures people are safe? 

Ownership [see note, below]: Who owns the land or facility? 

In addition to these common elements, each pattern has a name, description, key physical and human resources, links and visual reference material.  

The whole pattern deck is organised into a framework that helps us to categorise types of patterns and see how the patterns are connected to each other—from small to large, and from short to long-term.

A note on ownership: It is important to recognise that in Australia, the original custodians of the lands on which we live, work, play, and create are Aboriginal communities who never ceded this sovereignty to colonial settlers and institutions. Recognising Aboriginal sovereignty requires a reconfiguration of what we mean by commons. The commons cannot be understood simply as a space of shared use, collective stewardship, or open access. On stolen land, commoning begins from a different ethical and political ground: the recognition that Country is already held within relations of custodianship, law, obligation, and care. This recognition changes the meaning of responsibility. It asks non-Indigenous commoners to attend not only to shared futures, but to the histories of dispossession that shape the present conditions under which sharing is imagined. 

Táíwò’s account of reparations as constructive politics is especially useful. Reparations are not only backward-looking compensation for injury, but a forward-oriented project of rebuilding the world otherwise. In this frame, commoning is necessarily reparative: it must address the injuries of dispossession as part of the work of creating conditions for a shared future. This means returning authority, resources, and decision-making power, while also investing in collective infrastructures of care, responsibility, and ecological repair. A commons adequate to Aboriginal ownership would therefore be less a claim to shared access than a practice of reparation: a way of remaking relations so that shared futures are possible on more just terms.