City of the Future

Ownership, Collective Ownership, and the Pitfalls of Our Time

The modern concept of ownership is invented by humanity, but it does not seem to be serving the collective good. The unalienable rights of ownership and the lack of restrictions present deep challenges to the future. Here are three simple examples that we face every day:

- A rural land owner likes to wear white clothing and uses an excessive amount of bleach, which pollutes the ground water used by his neighbors.

- An urban land owner decides to take a central downtown plot and use it for a chemical factory, increasing downtown traffic significantly and pouring out excessive amounts of smoke into the air.

- A sovereign nation incentives farmers to start raising cattle, which leads to tens of thousands of acres of forest burned raising the global acidity of rain and massive soil erosion that pollutes the main river and lake systems for three adjoining nations.

These three hypothetical situations, which are occurring all of the time, demonstrate some of the fundamental problems with the modern Western concept of ownership that prevent the current model from scaling. For example, where do my rights of ownership begin and human rights of my neighbor end? What restrictions on ownership are needed to protect the human rights of my neighbor, and do these restrictions eventually call into question if I own anything at all?

There may be a better concept around collective ownership. We own the collective, and the collective owns “the assets.” You may even have representative ownership for the well being of land and animals, for example… Just a thought.

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