Collective Ownership and Representation in a Sustainable City Investigating the Potential of the Community Land Trust and the Zoöp Model

The question is no longer whether we should move to an environmentally sustainable way of living; rather, the question is – how are we supposed to do that? Katharina Pistor’s seminal book The Code of Capital pointed out that our current form of capitalism is enabled by private law, which selectively ‘codes’ certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. Law can be changed by the legislature, but legal concepts can equally be imbued with new meanings due to changing ways of seeing in society. Indeed, our investigation into two legal innovations – the Community Land Trust (CLT) and the Zoöp model – demonstrates how little change of the legal hardware of society is required for meaningful legal change in service of sustainability in the city and beyond. Whereas the CLT rethinks the stewardship function of property rights, the Zoöp model transforms corporate governance structures to consider nonhumans’ interests – and both do so without waiting for relevant legal changes to be enacted by legislatures. To evaluate the potential and the limitations of these two legal innovations, we assess the extent to which these innovations align with four ‘glocal’ lenses of the Doughnut model developed by the British economist Kate Raworth: to what extent to these legal innovations support the thriving of humans and environment both locally and globally?