Charlotte Ladd

‘Tragedy of the Commons?’ takes its name from an essay published by Garret Hardin in 1968. He suggested that common resources would never be handled efficiently and would be depleted if ‘proper’ regulations and fees were not used – essentially an argument for private property and privatising resources. The Diggers were a commune in 1649 whose ethos of a ‘common treasury for all’ is the complete antithesis to Hardin's theory. Their attempt to create a space for Gerard Winstanley's ideas to take shape, to share the resources available and care for each other show there have consistently been people trying to go against Hardin's theory. But how do these ideas permeate our society now? If you look in any urban area, you will see community gardens popping up everywhere, some permanent and some on borrowed time – just like the Diggers. Using cob tools, a cob oven and film to represent the persevering ideas of the Diggers, this project aims to evoke a critical look at how we choose to live within the context of current society, our access to the land we call home with the back ground of climate breakdown, and building upon existing knowledge to proivide alternative theories for living.