On Wednesday, February 24, Georgetown Law Professor Sheila Foster delivered FSU Law’s Spring 2021 Distinguished Lecture via Zoom. Foster is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Urban Law and Policy at Georgetown and holds a joint appointment with the Georgetown Law School and the McCourt School of Public Policy. Her areas of expertise include environmental law and justice, urban land use law and policy, and state and local government. Foster’s book “Co-Cities,” with co-author Christian Iaione, is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Foster’s lecture, “Mapping the New Urban Commons: Law and Resource Stewardship in the City,” proposed the question "to whom does the city belong" and used anecdotes from urban Philadelphia, New York City, Detroit and other cities to examine how we should think about ownership and control of land and physical resources that were once private, but end up back in the public domain. Foster went on to redefine city as an “urban commons”—meaning that the city is a collaborative space in which urban inhabitants are central actors in managing and governing city life and urban resources—and discussed community land trusts and the Co-Cities Project.

“I began over a decade ago by investigating how different kinds of urban assets, such as community gardens, parks and neighborhoods could be conceived as an urban commons and later have explored and developed with my co-author how to conceive the infrastructure of the city itself as a shared commons, a shared infrastructure on which a variety of urban actors can come together and collectively manage and govern these resources to provide in particular for communities that have less of the kinds of goods and services they need to flourish and survive,” said Foster. “And so in this way, I’m working in this space between public control and ownership and private—between the market and the state. It’s in this space I think we can locate a rich set of possibilities.”

The Distinguished Lecture was hosted by our nationally ranked environmental law program. A recording of Foster’s lecture can be found online.

Published on February 26, 2021