Talkoot commons: Advancing more-than-English commoning for sustainability transitions in cities

Abstract

If taking back the commons is key to meaningful urban sustainability transitions, what does multilingual study of commons practices tell us about how to achieve this? Our research presents a case study of the Finnish concept of talkoot to specify five place- and situation-specific characteristics of the urban commons and commoning work that talkoot effectively advances. These five key characteristics are drawn from the urban commons literature and point to tensions among inclusion and enclosure, surplus and cost, hierarchy, technology, and the vertigo of radical alternatives. The archival and case-based research in Helsinki illustrates the origins and wide variety of continued applications of talkoot in urban as in rural Finnish context, as well as how the paradoxes and challenges of urban commoning are addressed in mobilizing talkoot . Our empirical objective is to demonstrate the cultural continuity and evolution of Finnish-specific experience of the urban commons through careful consideration of the language of talkoot. Our conceptual objective is to pinpoint the utility of more-than-English research to locate more inclusive routes to urban commons transitions and restore a culturally-meaningful sense of the commons in the evolving context of urban life.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. City Culture and Society, 2026 · DOI ↗