Ghent's Commons Transition Plan — Mapping the City as a Partner to Its Commons

In 2016 the City of Ghent (Flanders, Belgium) commissioned commons researcher Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation, working with Yurek Onzia, to investigate how local government could support and formally partner with the city's grassroots "commons" economy — citizen-run initiatives in food, energy, digital infrastructure, coworking and neighbourhood care — rather than simply regulate or fund them case by case.

The research aimed to identify concrete governance changes that would let the city formally partner with commons initiatives, including replacing competitive calls for individual institutions with "calls for commons" that reward coalitions of complementary partners, and establishing a partner-city unit inside the administration.

The research team mapped more than 500 commons-oriented initiatives across Ghent, from fablabs and coworking spaces to food cooperatives and energy communities, and interviewed civic organisers and city officials. The resulting Commons Transition Plan was published in 2017.

The plan's own preliminary findings were candid about limitations: while Ghent's city administration was found to be genuinely engaged for the long term, city services remained sectorally fragmented, and citizen-led commons initiatives — though numerous and dynamic — were themselves fragmented, with only some sectors (notably food and energy) more organisationally mature than others. Ghent's approach influenced how other European cities, including Amsterdam and Madrid, discussed commons-based urban governance, and the plan remains a frequently cited reference case in commons and P2P-Foundation literature. No independent follow-up evaluation quantifying adoption of the plan's recommendations or downstream outcomes was found in public sources.

The plan is best read as an evidenced diagnostic and policy roadmap rather than a programme with measured outcomes: a useful early-stage model for cities beginning to formalise a relationship with their commons economy, but one whose on-the-ground implementation and impact are not yet independently verified.