From the perspectives of both (as they meet in the urban-commons literature), cooperation among residents develops and fosters the urban commons—shared, collectively produced and managed resources and social relations that constitute a form of non-commodified urban wealth.
Elinor Ostrom’s lens
Cooperation builds institutional and social capital that allows residents to govern common-pool resources without defaulting to pure privatization or top-down state control. In urban settings this appears as community gardens, shared infrastructure, neighborhood spaces, and other resources managed through clear boundaries, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and nested rules. The result is durable collective benefits: sustainable use, reduced free-riding, trust, and reciprocity—the practical payoff of her design principles applied to the city.
David Harvey’s lens
Cooperation takes the form of commoning: the social practice through which residents collectively produce the city’s shared life, ambiance, public spaces, and use-values. This creates an urban commons that is a product of collective labor. Capital then tends to appropriate or destroy it (extracting monopoly rents, converting it into assets that absorb surplus capital via the spatial fix). The political stake of the “right to the city” is therefore collective democratic control over how that surplus is produced and used, so the commons residents foster is not continually enclosed.
In short, both see resident cooperation as generating a shared urban resource system (the commons). Ostrom emphasizes the institutional mechanisms that make sharing work and deliver benefits; Harvey emphasizes that this commons is continually produced by residents yet remains vulnerable to capital’s surplus-absorption logic, so cooperation must also contest enclosure.
