What Are the Commons? - An Old Yet Newly Relevant Practice for Our Time
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We call Årc yakushima a Commons. But for many people, the word may not be familiar. Here, we'd like to trace the long history behind it and explain why we've chosen this word to describe Årc. This is a slightly longer read, but we hope it will take you closer to the thinking at the heart of Årc.
1. It Began with “Common Land”
The word commons originally referred to the common lands of medieval Europe, particularly in England. Pastures, forests, waters, wastelands. These were places used collectively by people in a village. They belonged neither to individuals nor exclusively to a lord. Based on local customs, people shared their use and managed them together.
What is important here is that the commons were not simply “land that belonged to no one.”
Villagers, or commoners, had rights to use the land—to graze cattle, gather firewood, and collect nuts and other resources. At the same time, communities had rules to prevent overuse, such as limits on how many cattle each household could graze.
In other words, from the beginning, the commons meant more than the resource itself. They were a set of relationships among people, together with the rules and practices through which that resource was cared for.
This is the most important starting point for understanding what Årc means by the commons today.
2. Enclosure — When Common Land Became Private Property
Between the 15th and 19th centuries, common lands gradually disappeared across England. Landowners fenced them off and converted them into private property. This process became known as Enclosure.
One of its drivers was wool. As the textile industry grew, raising sheep became increasingly profitable. Landowners enclosed commons that villagers had depended on and converted them into sheep pasture. Farmers displaced from the land lost the foundation of their livelihoods. Many moved to cities and eventually became wage laborers in factories.
Thomas More famously described this in Utopia as “sheep eating people”—the supposedly gentle animal swallowing people by driving them from the land. Marx later positioned enclosure as part of primitive accumulation, a foundation of capitalism.
Strip enclosure down to its basic mechanism, and it looks like this:
Something that once supported everyone's lives is fenced off, transformed into a private asset that can be traded on the market, and the people who depended on it are pushed out.
Shared wealth becomes a commodity. And this logic is not confined to history. The same thing is happening today in tourist destinations around the world—including here on Yakushima.
With plans for direct flights from Tokyo and the growth of inbound tourism, more and more homes on Yakushima are being converted into accommodation. Homes that once supported everyday life are being “enclosed” as income-generating market assets. As a result, workers and families raising children struggle to find places to live, contributing to the decline of the island's population. The structure is remarkably similar to what happened in England 500 years ago.
Årc's Local Coop Housing project is therefore not simply about providing housing. It is an attempt to begin protecting the foundations of everyday life from enclosure, and to sustain them instead as a commons.
3. “The Tragedy of the Commons” — A Major Misunderstanding
In the second half of the 20th century, the commons came to be seen as a system that simply doesn't work.
One major reason was ecologist Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons.
His argument was simple: on a shared pasture, each person has an incentive to add more cattle for their own benefit. If everyone does the same, the pasture will eventually be depleted, leaving everyone worse off.
Shared resources, therefore, will inevitably collapse. The only solutions are either privatization or state control.
This simple and powerful story was repeatedly cited over the following decades to justify privatization and market-based approaches: “Sharing doesn't work. Leave it to the market.” It became a convenient argument for enclosure.
But something important was missing. What Hardin described as a “tragedy” was actually an open-access resource with no one governing it. That is fundamentally different from the historical commons, which had rules and were actively cared for by communities. He had confused open access with governed commons.
And one person would later overturn this misunderstanding with evidence.
4. Ostrom — “The Commons Can Be Governed”
Elinor Ostrom was a political scientist who, in 2009, became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Her life's work demonstrated one simple but decisive fact:
The commons are not inherently tragic. When governed by the people who depend on them, they can endure for centuries without relying solely on either markets or the state.
She did not arrive at this conclusion through theory alone. She studied real commons around the world: alpine pastures in Switzerland, irrigation associations in Spain, water systems in the Philippines, and iriai forests in Japan. These communities had managed shared resources sustainably for centuries without exhausting them.
For Årc, this has two important implications.
The first is that the commons are a workable model. They are neither a pastoral ideal nor nostalgia for a lost past. When the right conditions are in place, the commons offer a practical third way that can function even today. The assumption that “sharing doesn't work” has been disproved by real-world evidence.
The second is that the key lies in governance by the people involved. Across the cases Ostrom studied, one principle stood out: rather than having someone from outside manage the resource, the people who actually use it create the rules themselves, monitor how those rules work, and continually adapt them when necessary. The people who use it are also the people who govern it. That is one of the central reasons commons can endure.
These two ideas closely reflect the structure of Årc. Årc's Co-Owners don't simply “use” this place as they might a vacation home. They participate in its management and decision-making, lead projects, and contribute their knowledge and networks. Those who use the place also govern it. Through the collaborative structure of our Co-Owners, Årc puts into practice one of the conditions Ostrom identified for sustaining the commons.
And there is one more detail worth mentioning. One of the examples Ostrom studied was Japan's own tradition of iriai forests. The commons are not simply a new concept imported from the West. They are also part of a tradition of governance that has long existed in Japan. Perhaps what Årc is doing is simply cultivating that fading wisdom again for the present.
5. The Commons Is Not a “Noun,” but a “Verb”
In recent years, the idea of the commons has expanded far beyond land. Open-source software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons—these are commons of knowledge and the digital world. What we share is no longer limited to forests and water.
Another important shift has also taken place: understanding the commons not as a thing or resource, but as an action or practice. This is known as commoning.
The idea is simple:
The commons is not simply a resource that exists. It exists only as long as people continue to share it, care for it, and govern it together. Once that practice stops, it becomes just another resource.
The commons, then, is not something that simply is. It is sustained only through what people continually do. It is not a noun, but a verb.
At Årc, this can mean sharing a meal or a car with someone. Helping out in the garden or farm. Sharing knowledge and experience. Leaving shared spaces and tools ready for the next person.
Each of these small acts is a form of commoning. Simply staying at Årc can become a way of doing the commons. That's why we describe staying here not as “using” a place, but as taking part in its circulation.
6. What the Commons Mean to Årc
We've traveled through a long history. From medieval common lands to enclosure. From the “tragedy” imposed on the commons to Ostrom's rediscovery of their possibilities. And finally, to the idea of commoning as a verb.
Årc seems to stand somewhere at the end of this long thread—although, to be fair, I only learned much of this history later myself.
So here, once again, is our definition:
For us, the commons are the relationships and practices through which forms of richness that were never meant to be mere commodities—nature, art, everyday life—are kept from being enclosed by the market, and instead cared for, governed together, and passed on to those who come next.
The forests, waters, and land of Yakushima were once regarded as sacred. People approached them with reverence, shared their gifts, and cared for them together.
Over time, they were commodified and divided into state and private property, becoming part of the market economy.
And yet, shared forms of richness can still endure when the people involved govern them themselves—just as Japan's tradition of iriai has shown.
Årc is an attempt to cultivate this old yet newly relevant wisdom in a contemporary form, here on Yakushima. And that brings us to the next question:
How can we create an economic system that keeps this commons alive and in circulation? Our answer is the Commons Economy.
