Email from David (2/18/21): "Here is one that I encountered today -- Cooling the Commons, at www.coolingthecommons.com. https://theconversation.com/how-new-design-patterns-can-enable-cities-and-their-residents-to-change-with-climate-change-152749 The article pushes the adaptation conversation beyond technological fixes, focusing instead on the patterns, “context specific interactions between people and things” that compose urban life and the way these can be re-worked over time to produce a new shared-urban form. For example, the relationship between the built environment, trees, shade, moving water and wind can make the difference between a bearable and an unendurable summer day. Patterns are conceived of here as a distributed property and that is what ties them to the commons. To wit this piece emerged in relation to a larger Sydney-based project, Cooling the Commons, that’s developed over the last several years and involves CERN members in working across academic institutions University of Technology Sydney (Abby Mellick Lopes and Cameron Tokinwise), Western Sydney University (Katherine Gibson, Stephen Healy, Louise Crabtree, Emma Power) and Queensland University of Technology (Helen Armstrong). The Cooling the Commons project explores the role that refashioning patterns, including new habits of social practice, might play in responding to the heat in Western Sydney, currently home to 1 out of 10 Australians and, in the summer months, some of the hottest suburbs on earth. The project has given us an opportunity to work with a wide array of planning agencies, council bodies, social housing providers and advocacy organisations. It now has an associated website to showcase the patterns described in the article: http://www.coolingthecommons.com/ The pattern deck is a key feature. It is a design tool for thinking about how we can respond collectively to the heat (besides shutting the door and turning on the AC). We’d really love your thoughts on the patterns, we are hoping it will be a useful resource for teaching, research and practice as time goes on and we add new patterns and retire or reframe old ones. In the spirit of community economy, thinking with patterns, commoning the cool, involves us in a process of renegotiating how we live with one another in place and in the context of a warmer world."