The Revolution Will Be Shared: Rebuilding the Urban Commons

Darren Cotton founded The Tool Library in 2011 with a very immediate need: a rundown apartment and an absentee landlord. What started as a handful of members and a few dozen tools has blossomed into a community of over a thousand members and over 4,000 tools – all based around one simple idea – ‘sharing.’ More than just providing individuals with affordable access to tools, however, The Tool Library has become a platform for community change. Whether it is tree plantings, community gardens, public art or repair clinics, the Tool Library provides residents with the tools they need to transform ideas into reality. By prioritizing access over ownership, and creating a collectively held resource or “commons,” tool libraries represent a new way to fight inequalities in our cities. They help create new social and economic constructs that imagine a world beyond our current growth-driven capitalist system. By recreating the commons, tool libraries are demonstrating that a collective way of sharing, accessing and using resources is not only possible, but urgent and necessary.