The purpose of this research is to analyse the process of (re)constitution of urban commons by actors involved in action situations. What follows is a description of the way in which these actors are organised and (re)claim urban space, asserting their rights to the city, in relation to the introduced framework. For my analysis of two initiatives in Poland I propose the approach of Elinor Ostrom and address its limitations and critiques as well as outline further areas of research.

No abstract

No abstract

This paper concentrates on the scientific work of Elinor Ostrom , who for more than forty years carried out theoretical and empirical research on common-pool resources.Ostrom theorizes that the commons often prevent resource exhaustion more effectively than the state, international institutions, or private owners. However, one of the foundations of commons, as an alternative program to the private-state dualism, ought to be the principle of equality that includes a gender perspective in theory and practice. The goal of this article is to provide thoughtful ways of incorporating gender in economic research from the viewpoint of feminist epistemology and to indicate the place of gender in Ostrom's work. The methodology of this study could be used for reading economic publications through a gender perspective as well as for inspiring economists to use both gender as a category of analysis and gender-sensitive language in their theoretical and empirical studies.

The involvement of women in the organization and functioning of voluntary self-help groups and their activity in the forums of these groups on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic is surprisingly high. In Poland, the share of women involved in the "visible hand" groups was 80 percent. This article is based on the theoretical considerations of solidarity and mutual aid and points to the nexus of women and urban commons. It also presents the results of empirical research, based on mixed methods, devoted to the motivations of members to join affinity groups of this kind in the era of the pandemic as well as their expectations and the perceived benefits and dangers/threats. The obtained results contradict the stereotypical assumption that the high level of participation of women in self-help groups is related to the reproductive work they perform and the most important motivation for them is community building. There is also a finding related to women's agency, namely that all contemporary social movements mobilize a greater percentage of women. The members of the affinity groups surveyed see numerous benefits from their actions, both for others and for themselves (especially in psychological and social dimensions), and the most frequently indicated danger is dishonesty. The results of this research are an important contribution to both the theories of urban commons and informal