PLoT: People's Land Trust is a social art project that brings together participants, collaborators and co-creators to engage in collective strategies and artistic methodologies to reimagine the future city. The project explores issues of urban land use and stewardship for the next 200 years that transcend individual needs whilst considering wider ethical questions around commoning practices.
The project engages with grass-roots community-led processes to reimagine urban places, resources and co-living. It takes into account the wider interconnected, critical concerns of ecology, population, climate, social relations, public policy, cultural practices, city infrastructure and interspecies inhabitation.
PLoT, asks us to imagine what we might be able to share through collaboration, exchange and generosity, and what would happen if we produced communal knowledge, organised collectively and pooled resources.
“The act of commoning draws on a network of relationships made under the expectation that we will each take care of one another and with a shared understanding that some things belong to all of us — which is the essence of the commons itself. The practice of commoning demonstrates a shift in thinking from the prevailing ethic of “you’re on your own” to “we’re in this together.”
Julie Ristau www.onthecommons.org
Commons: three entwined concepts;
Pooled (urban) Resources as Commons
All commons involve some sort of common pool of resources, understood as non-commodified means of fulfilling people's needs.(1) Examples of urban commons resources include physical spaces, such as community gardens, street furniture and playgrounds; intangible elements such as culture and public art…(2)
Co-creating Commons through Commoning Practices
The commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities. Communities are sets of commoners who share these resources and who define for themselves the rules according to which they are accessed and used.(1)
Commoning as Emergent Relational Practices
Commoning refers to the collaborative, participatory process of accessing, negotiating and governing the commons resources.(1) This is the active doing of commoning. Commoning practices can include various activities such as co-creation, capacity building and placemaking, support through learning, innovation, performing art, protest, urban gardening...(2)
PLoT has designed three wooden mobile handcarts which are a tool to enable the creation of an outdoor work and social space, a mobile commons.
PLoT’s (Mobile) Commons is currently in residence in Tramore Valley Park (2024 – 2026) a 170 acre urban public park reclaimed from a former landfill site managed by Cork city’s local authority. As part of the residency the handcarts are available as a space and tool for commoning practices which consider ethical questions of urban land, water and air ‘use’. In the context of Tramore Valley Park, the (Mobile) Commons supports communities in their exploration of community values and ethics, climate change, cultural practices, urban-rural boundaries, and interspecies cohabitation.
Under a Creative Commons licence, PLoT have made digital laser cut plans for the three handcarts available to download and use to ‘Build Your Own (Mobile) Commons’.
digital laser cut plans for the threehandcarts are available here todownload and use under a CreativeCommons licence.
Scroll across for downloads
‘Build Your Own (Mobile) Commons’
PLoT (People’s Land Trust) is a collaborative project initiated in 2020 by artists Marilyn Lennon, Colette Lewis and Elinor Rivers in Cork city, Ireland.
We work through social art practice and are aligned through an interest in collaborative approaches to investigating complex interrelationships of space, place and people. Collectively we have backgrounds in contemporary art, ecology, activism, participatory design and education. We employ a range of artistic methods for alternative forms of cooperation and production such as performative actions, pedagogy, discussion and other forms of praxis including embodied processes, thinking through making, mapping, participatory games, planning and visualisation.
PLoT project’s recent activities include PLoT (Mobile) Commons, KinShip Project Residency, Tramore Valley Park, Cork (2024-25), terza terra Pistoletto / Cittadellarte a Villa Manin, Udine, Italy (2024), PLoT Radical Summer School, Cork (2021), UNIDEE Residency Groundwork for Embedded Arts Practice, Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy (2021), TEST SITE, Thinking Community Land Trusts (2021) and Future, Land, Commons, Culture Night Cork (2020).
PLoT is a recipient of the Arts Participation Project Award, Arts Council of Ireland (2021), Artist in the Community Award, Research and Development Strand with Mentoring, Arts Council of Ireland managed by CREATE (2020) and Art in Context, Research and Development Award, Cork City Council (2020) and the Artist in the Community Award, Research and Development Strand, Arts Council of Ireland managed by CREATE (2018).
