The commons is increasingly invoked as a way to envision new worlds. One strand of commons research focuses at the local scale, on small groups in “traditional”, mostly rural societies; this research asks how commons are maintained over time. Another strand focuses on the commons at a global scale; this is political research that asks how commons can be reclaimed from a capitalist landscape. Here, I bridge these two approaches by theorizing the commons as reclaimed and maintained in the context of the city, through examining the experiences of limited‐equity housing cooperatives in Washington, DC. I argue that the urban commons is marked by two distinct traits: it emerges in space that is saturated with people, competing uses, and financial investment; and it is constituted by the collective work of strangers. The challenges of reclaiming and maintaining an urban commons are substantial, but the need for them is urgent.

The urban commons is a question of increasing interest to scholars and activists; three recent edited volumes help move the conversation along. Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market, edited by Mary Dellenbaugh, Markus Kip, Majken Bieniok, Agnes Katharina Mu¨ller and Martin Schwegmann, was published by Berlin's Birkha¨user press in 2015. Urban Commons: Rethinking the City, edited by Christian Borch and Martin Kornberger, was published by Routledge, also in 2015. Finally, Make_Shift City: Renegotiating the Urban Commons is a bilingual English/German volume, edited by Francesca Ferguson of Urban Drift Projects, and published by Berlin's Jovis press in 2014. Because all the books are edited collections, their contributions to theorising

A small but growing group of scholars is calling for conservation science to turn its attention to cities, characterized previously in these pages as the places "where