Commons

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.

Background

The term "commons" derives from the traditional English legal term of common land, also known colloquially as "Commons". However, while common land might have been owned collectively, by a legal entity, the crown or a single person, it was subject to different forms of regulated usage, such as grazing of livestock, hunting, lopping of foliage or collecting resins. In distinction, the term commons in modern economic theory has come to refer to the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, such as air, water, and a habitable earth.

A failure (tragedy of the commons) was a widespread metaphor of early economics, which came up in the 18th centuries. Early econonomic writers and scientists were supporters of the British Agricultural Revolution and Land reform laws and were in favour of unified ownership of the land. They tried to get rid of the traditional usage rights of the commoners and used the tragedy of the commons as a suitable metaphor. They quoted, among others, Aristotle's polemic against the Polis of Platon in the sense of "everybody's property is nobody's property" and respectively "the most common good is the least guarded". The conflict around the dissolution of the traditional commons played a watershed role in landscape development and cooperative land use patterns and property rights. Among others, pamphlets as of 1833 by William Forster Lloyd on herders overusing a shared parcel of land on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze became part of the common wisdom in economics. The same concept is sometimes called the "tragedy of the fishers", because fishing too many fish before or during breeding could cause stocks to plummet.

Concurrency (road)

A concurrency in a road network is an instance of one physical road bearing two or more different highway, motorway, or other route numbers. When two freeways share the same right-of-way, it is sometimes called a common section or commons. Other terminology for a concurrency includes overlap,coincidence,duplex (two concurrent routes), triplex (three concurrent routes) multiplex (any number of concurrent routes),dual routing or triple routing.

Concurrent numbering can become very common in countries that allow it. Where multiple routes must pass through a single mountain crossing, or through a major city, it is often economically and practically advantageous for them all to be accommodated on a single physical road. In some countries, however, concurrent numbering is avoided by posting only one route number on road signs; these routes disappear at the start of the concurrency and reappear when it ends. Criticism of concurrencies include environmental intrusion, as well as being considered a factor in road accidents.

Commons (disambiguation)

Commons are shared resources.

Commons may also refer to:

Shared resources

Computing and internet

People

Places

Other