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Rights of Where: A Commoner’s Investigation Into Our Gradual Loss of Rights Over Our Natural Commons

Part 2 Dissertation 2021
Jack Harding
University for the Creative Arts | UK
We are all commoners of the land we occupy. By virtue of this fact, we have been afforded rights over our land for various means, the base of these being subsistence. For if the common person were to fall into destitution the common land would provide. This was our right enshrined in the Charter of the Forest.

The aforementioned notion has become intentionally distorted by elite and foreign capital and successive government administrations to become, in the minds of many commoners, a whimsical notion of a past life. The neoliberalist policies of the executive that have been the accepted norm since the 1980s in England and Wales have opened the commons up to market, leading inevitably to privatisation, exclusion and exploitation for gains of individuals. The accepted notions of private land ownership have led to a culture of excluding the commoner from their common land to facilitate ‘exclusive enjoyment’ by those of a higher society to which it supposedly has been ‘purchased’ by.

We are the stewards of our natural common’s locale, not the owners, and this is the way it must be to maintain the inter-generational equity within our green spaces and our rights of way that traverse them.

Jack Harding

Tutor(s)
Carlotta Novella
2021
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