The common life of yards

Recent scholarship has begun to reimagine the commons beyond its traditional meaning as a collectively owned and managed natural resource. Building on research that considers commons through the practices which produce and maintain them—commoning—this article analyzes how privately owned front and backyards participate in urban commons. Through ethnographic research in three neighborhoods of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the article shows how these commons are made in two key registers: through yards as shared territories and through everyday practices of sharing plants across individual yards. The article’s central claim is that yards and the everyday practices which take place in and through them constitute one nodal point in the making of urban commons. In so doing, logics of private property come to be interwoven with logics of commoning. By finding a diverse range of common lives of yards, this article adds to emerging conversations about the nature of urban commons