2.1. The emergence of commoning

The modern cannon of commons scholarship originated with Elinor Ostrom and like-minded colleagues’ empirical and theoretical work on common property regimes (e.g., Acheson, 1988; Basurto & Ostrom, 2009; Berkes et al., 1989; Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom et al., 1999), countering Garett Hardin’s (1968) assertion that only private property or government control could prevent ‘tragedies’ of natural resource commons. These scholars argue that “collective action and strong local institutions can play an instrumental role in resource conservation” (Beitl, 2011, p. 486), and their work has provided important empirical examples of common property governance regimes successfully managing ecological resources (e.g., Basurto, 2005; Berkes et al., 1989; Huron, 2015).

This traditional commons scholarship can be termed the ‘institutional’ approach, as their analytical focus rests largely on the social norms, rules, and institutional arrangements that contribute to successful commons management. These are manifested most prominently in Ostrom’s well-known ‘design principles’ outlining the conditions under which one might expect successful resource management to occur (McGinnis & Ostrom, 1996; Ostrom, 1993). Institutional scholars are careful to clarify differences between commons (or common-pool resources) and the property rights regimes available to govern them. Their work understands common-pool resources as those resources “for which exclusion is difficult and joint use involves subtractability” (Berkes et al., 1989, p. 91).

As a result of its theoretical focus on institutions and historical development as a reaction to Hardin’s theoretical open-access commons, this body of work has primarily concentrated on ecological resource commons (i.e., fisheries, forests, water systems) and the (often rural, community-based) collective action practices that can sustain them (Borch & Kornberger, 2015). While more recently institutional scholars have broadened their notion of ‘the commons’ to include ‘new’ commons (e.g., knowledge, global, and cultural commons amongst others (Hess, 2008; Ostrom et al., 1999)), they have generally continued to apply an institutional lens to analyses of these commons (Beitl, 2011; Mundoli et al., 2017).

While building on key insights from institutional work, another vein of commons scholarship is emerging from history, geography, and anthropology that conceives of commons not as a resource or entity per se, but rather as a process (Cooke & Lane, 2018; Gibson-Graham et al., 2016; Linebaugh, 2008). This emphasis on process has led to the term shifting from a noun to a verb: commoning (Linebaugh, 2008). Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy (2016, p. 4) offer one working definition of commoning (“…establishing rules or protocols for access and use, taking caring of and accepting responsibility for a resource, and distributing the benefits in ways that take into account the wellbeing of others”), while others place greater emphasis on how commons are “always part of ‘thick’ interdependent relations between human and nonhuman others” (Bresnihan, 2016, p. 23). With commoning, the emphasis is on the action: action that might flow in multiple directions, might include nonhuman agency, and might be deeply entangled with personal histories, shifting ecologies, or political moves (Basurto & Garcia Lozano, 2021; Cooke & Lane, 2018).

While thinking via a commoning frame does not exclude attention to classically institutional concerns about the formation and operation of norms and behaviors, it places greater emphasis on the multidirectional, more-than-human, and shifting qualities of such behaviors. In its emphasis on continually emergent, contingent, and entangled performances, commoning has much in common with assemblage thinking (B. Anderson et al., 2012; McFarlane, 2011; McFarlane & Anderson, 2011), though authors employing commoning generally have a more explicitly normative interest in outcomes of socio-natural wellbeing (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016; Iaione, 2016; Nightingale, 2019). Commoning addresses increasingly complex realities as engagements with ‘new’ commons reveal the limitations of the institutional lens, which has difficulty accounting for non-ecological resources and complex property regimes (Bresnihan & Byrne, 2015; Turner, 2016).

2.2. Commoning with urban spaces and infrastructures

Urban commons are an especially rich area for pushing commons theorizing further since “contra Ostrom, the notion of a commons as a self-evident and independent object makes little sense… In the city, the commons is an inherently relational phenomenon” (Borch & Kornberger, 2015, p. 7, emphasis original). Common spaces in cities are special: they may be non-subtractible resources (e.g., a lively downtown), or they may exist within privatized or government property (Baibarac & Petrescu, 2017; Bresnihan & Byrne, 2015). Commons in cities also present special challenges; namely, that they are “enacted in saturated space… [and] constituted by the coming together of strangers” (Huron, 2015, p. 963). The characteristics of urban commons are therefore complex, and ripe for further investigation.

The idea of commoning overlaps in productive ways with questions about space, infrastructures, and wellbeing. While the commoning literature has often focused on communal spaces (such as community gardens), less attention has been paid to the role of particular kinds of infrastructure in affecting commoning activities, or vice versa. We find this question interesting since “where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen” (Warf & Arias, 2009, p. 1, emphasis original). In Tampa Bay, waters that shift in fecal coliform concentrations intermingle with social processes that shift fisher bodies from place to place, creating complex patterns of risks and benefits. Our investigation of these patterns emphasizes the “complex relationality of places and persons connected through performances” (J. Anderson, 2012, p. 575). How these performances are connected with particular spaces and to what extent they constitute commoning are key questions of this paper.

To explore these questions, we draw on work examining the importance of public spaces to wellbeing, in particular studies of urban foraging as well as infrastructures of care. For instance, research on land-based urban foraging has found that most motivations for engaging in foraging are connected directly to wellbeing, and that foraging provides individual subsistence, recreational, cultural, religious, educational, and health benefits (Shackleton et al., 2017). Community-wide benefits have been found as well; for example, foraging in de facto and de jure urban forest commons has been shown to “improve mental well-being, lower crime rates, enhance social cohesion, and promote community empowerment,” though importantly such access is uneven and empowerment is not necessarily equally distributed (Grabbatin et al., 2011; Hurley & Halfacre, 2011; Poe et al., 2013, p. 409).

At the same time, urban scholars (e.g., Alam & Houston, 2020; Phillips & Atchison, 2020) are bringing together work on infrastructures of care, which is concerned with “how things facilitate…and co-constitute caring relations” (Power & Williams, 2020, p. 3, emphasis added), with broader work on the performative role of infrastructure in mediating more-than-human urban life (e.g, Barua, 2021; Graham & McFarlane, 2014). Such studies challenge us to take seriously “the agency of place” and to ask ambitious questions about the ways that care ‘flows’ materially and relationally through cities (Alam & Houston, 2020, p. 4; Power & Williams, 2020).

4.1. Practices of commoning and the role of more-than-human infrastructures

If urban commons are inherently relational (Borch & Kornberger, 2015), the presence of actors who might become entangled with one another is a prerequisite for commoning. To this end, we found that fishers spend a substantial amount of time in fishing spaces (Table 3 and Figure 2), interacting with each other and the more-than-human actors co-creating these spaces—piers and rock outcroppings, fish cleaning stations, birds, saltwater, mangroves, marine mammals, and fish themselves. The fishers we encountered spent over five hours per outing on average and fished frequently, including 25% who fished over 10 times a month.

Moreover, the fishers standing side-by-side at the rail, jockeying for space or sharing baitfish, were a more diverse group than is encountered in many other public spaces in Tampa Bay, with its legacy of segregation (Johns et al., 2013). Several fishers commented on this – as one who explained, “I meet all sorts of people fishing, people I’d never have cause to talk to otherwise but fishing gives us common ground” (FN 03/11/21). Our survey triangulates these observations, as our sample was more diverse than the Tampa Bay area as a whole. For instance, fishers identifying as Asian made up 11% of our respondents, compared to only 3% of the Tampa Bay population (Census Reporter, 2018). Our survey revealed a wide range of economic diversity as well (Table 2). A subset of our survey participants were under clear economic stress: 17% sometimes or often felt they did not have enough money to buy food over the previous year. This food insecurity was experienced by all ethnic groups, though at slightly differing levels (22% of respondents self-identifying as Latinx or mixed, 16% of Black or Asian (or mixed), and 14% of White or mixed).

In these diverse spaces, we found a mix of community-making and care, passive indifference, and active distrust. While in every fishing site we found evidence of commoning (operationalized via Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy’s (2016) criteria), we observed patterns of behavioral and attitudinal differences by type of fishing space. In the well-known, more crowded fishing locations popular with tourists, snowbirds, and year-round locals, there were many positive interactions. People shared laughs, baitfish, and advice while waiting for a tug on their lines and newcomers were expected and accepted. However, it was also in these spaces that our interviews revealed the most distrust toward “others” (e.g., “rednecks,” “Asians,” “poor people” or anyone else deemed “ignorant”), which was often simultaneously entangled with expressions of care for fish (FN 05/12/16, FN 06/14/18, FN 05/13/19). These problematic (given their classist and/or racist undertones) expressions of care and blame were most often voiced by catch-and-release or “sport” fishers, who sometimes couched their care for fishery resources in terms of their disapproval of others’ actions (i.e., keeping undersized fish). At the same time, people wrestled with the question of when it might be permissible to blur the rules. As one fisher who was upset at seeing undersized fish kept mused, “I wonder, are they so hungry? Does the end justify the means?” (Int.19E).

These popular fishing locations were equipped with amenities that facilitated pro-social and environmental behaviors: bait shops with authoritative information on fishing regulations, restrooms, fish cleaning stations with running water, and plentiful trash cans and fishing line recycling tubes. These well-equipped piers also often required payment to enter and were adjacent to higher-income neighborhoods or desirable open water access. Despite the diversity recorded in these spaces, they are not accessible to all fishers. Indeed, we found a lower proportion of food-insecure fishers at pay-to-enter piers (9%) than in our survey overall (17%). The fact that some food-insecure fishers still used these piers suggests that the combination of infrastructure and ecological location (over “moving” water) provides enough benefit to remain worthy of financial investment.

The more marginal fishing locations we visited are closer to urban centers, not on the government-sponsored map of fishing piers, of questionable legality, have more treacherous access to the water, and are often the result of fishers being excluded from other spaces. One example is beneath the Courtney Campbell Causeway (Figure 3), where fishers moved after a controversial Florida Department of Transportation decision to close the pedestrian walkway to anglers. In many of these spaces, we observed a strong internal cohesion of the community of users. For example, at one urban neighborhood pier, a self-described “regular” explained that the pier contained a “real community” of people, ranging from “high-rollers,” who gathered at sunset each day to fish and admire the view, to homeless and other food-insecure visitors, who were often recipients of extra fish (FN 7/12/18).

In these spaces we also found a complex mix of care for more-than-human actors. While there was more wariness about enforcement of fisheries regulations, fishers in marginal spaces often mentioned the connection with nature they sought through the act of fishing. One man rescued the same bird twice from fishing gear at a neighborhood bridge and returned regularly to feed his bait to the bird (FN 6/10/19). While feeding wildlife is discouraged by conservation biologists, for this man it fostered a deeply-felt relationship with more-than-human life. At the same time, the physical spaces of these marginal locations are the least well cared for in terms of the material remains of human activity. At many locations, cigarette butts, broken beer bottles, chunks of styrofoam coolers, old fishing line, and rusty hooks lay scattered about, suggesting that types of caring practices (or lack of them) are related to levels of care expressed by the city via its investment (or lack of it) in particular spaces. In places with no restrooms, trash cans, or line tubes, fishing communities that engage in commoning practices with the socioecological actors around them are unable and unwilling to extend care to the infrastructure itself. Despite the condition of these spaces, many fishers continued to link them to their wellbeing.

4.2. Connections between commoning and wellbeing

As a result of the commoning activities occurring in fishing spaces, we observed increases in nutritional, social, and mental wellbeing. In terms of nutrition, as noted above, about 17% of our respondents could be classified as food insecure. At the same time, 77% of respondents kept the fish they caught, and of those, 97% ate their fish. This indicates that eating fish is important to many more people than just those who identify as food insecure. Considering how often people reported fishing and the average number of fish kept per trip (5.6), a substantial amount of wild-sourced protein is being consumed. In addition, people were targeting diverse varieties of fish, with 27 different species mentioned. For 11% of our participants, fishing was even more essential: the activity helped prevent them from going hungry over the previous year. Indeed, several fishers emphasized this element of nutritional support, as one who explained that last time he was out, he caught enough food to last him three days (FN 6/5/18). Another referred to the water as his grocery store (FN 7/17/18).

Fishing also provided important social benefits to fishers, including the ability to strengthen bonds with family and to pass on skills. In this way, social interactions combined individual benefits with practices of care and commoning. Many emphasized the pleasure they felt from passing along their skills to others. As one father explained, he loved to see the reactions of his kids- “If I tell them I am going fishing they say ‘Oh Daddy, Daddy I want to go, can I go, can I go?’ They love it” (Int.1). Novice fishers also noted the educational benefits of socializing at local fishing spots. One mentioned, “I just moved here…I come to the park a lot because I can talk to people that have more experience” (Int.26B).

Fishing also contributed more intangible benefits to mental health and wellbeing. Many fishers described how location (outdoors, near the water) and activity (fishing, socializing or enjoying alone time) combined to improve their state of mind. The terms “peaceful,” “relaxing,” and “fun” were common descriptors of fishing experiences. One fisher explained, “I like being around water…It’s like good meditation” (Int.8C). A deeper connection with the nonhuman world was highly valued as part of the fishing experience. Another fisher told us he recently got into wade fishing, “where you’re standing in the water and walking around. That I find the most enjoyable, [being] in touch with nature” (Int.13A).

4.3. The precarity of public infrastructures and challenges to commoning

At the same time that infrastructures are a medium for commoning (Barua, 2021), these processes and spaces are also precarious. Most palpably, legal fishing spaces have diminished over the past several decades. Opportunities for bridge fishing in particular have been foreclosed as both neighborhood bridges and major public bridges have restricted fishing. In the 1950s, bridge fishing was encouraged by state officials and special infrastructure was built to support fishers. As a 1956 article in the local newspaper reported, “4,000 feet of catwalks have been built on the new span of Gandy Bridge” (Allyn, 1956, p. 4C). By the late 1960s, however, officials began closing bridges to fishing, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s and has continued since (Ave, 2001; Frago, 2016a; Keefer, 1985; St. Petersburg Times, 1968).

Conflicts over fishing infrastructures have centered around two intertwined elements: perceived incompatibility with other types of recreation, and accusations that fishers behave in disruptive ways. For instance, a recently renovated bridge spanning Tampa Bay included a $14.6 million pedestrian component that eliminated fishing after bicyclists declared they “can’t coexist with anglers” who leave broken glass and fish hooks on the path (Parker, 2013, p. 4A). By 2016, the City of St. Petersburg had banned fishing on nine additional local bridges, usually after complaints from neighbors (Frago, 2016a). Fishers have pushed back, noting that the underlying issue is “class oriented” (Frago, 2016a, p. 6B). The result of these types of conflicts, however, has generally been the elimination of fishing from key infrastructures and the movement of fishers to more precarious spaces.

As the bridge controversies have shown, people’s attitudes can present challenges to commoning. A certain stigma has come to be associated with fishing in particular marginal spaces. For example the area next to the Gandy cross-bay bridge was referred to as the “Redneck Riviera” (FN 7/12/18). Perhaps because of this stigma, these marginal areas often had tight-knit communities of users. For instance, the space beneath the Courtney Campbell Causeway is a popular fishing spot for a regular group of fishers, who reported the importance of sharing fish with their communities, but were suspicious of outsiders. One morning a young girl, accompanying her parents while they cast lines from the slippery boulders at the water’s edge, mouthed “go away,” at us until we did (FN 6/11/18).

Finally, an essential element of fishing infrastructure is of course the water itself, another precarious piece. At the same time that fishers feel squeezed for space, many express concerns about the water quality (Table 3). They were aware of stories about red tide, sewage spills, and stormwater runoff events. As one explained, “Last year they put 200 million gallons of raw sewage into Boca Ciega Bay” (Int.8A). In this way, some fishers felt uneasy about their ability to fish safely in the future, and their fears are well-founded: antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been found in Tampa Bay waters (Pittman, 2016), runoff events regularly force swimming closures in the Bay (Frago, 2016b; e.g, Tampa Bay Times, 2012), and as of this writing, an old phosphate plant just spilled millions of gallons of contaminated wastewater into Tampa Bay (Sampson, 2021). The uncertainty surrounding the health of the bay thus adds another layer of precarity to the ensemble of fishing infrastructure.