Urban commons and social sustainability: proposing a theoretical framework of social practices in urban commons.

Due to climate change in the last 20 years, a great number of natural- hazard-related disasters occurred worldwide that led to the deprivation of bio-diversity, claimed millions of lives, and caused massive economic losses worldwide. There are many causes of Climate Change but it is more a general human concern that can be mitigated through changing or reducing some specific human activities and educating individuals about biological diversity to create awareness concerning the immediate needs. In this sense, this study centralizes the individuals along with their collective and personal relations to understand the ways of climate change mitigation in the urban commons sphere since urban spaces and commons hold more than half of the world’s population and consume three-quarters of global energy that affects the increasing amount of greenhouse gas emissions. They are also the places where individuals exchange knowledge and create relations. As the places where this knowledge is created, collaborative networks were presented as a solution considering their ability to affect many aspects of innovation through their rapid, effective, and wide-ranging processes. In the networks, individuals can also find collectively created environments to share their experience, labor, and knowledge that form a space where economic and non-economic activities can meet to solve and enhance the issues/ status quo of the community, and urban environment. To support the argument and the theoretical text, at the end of the literature survey that consisted of nearly 175 published works, and 11 contemporary inputs, I used two different but interconnected research tools; (1) Keyword analysis, and (2) Reflective inputs. (1) The keyword analysis was used mainly for three purposes; firstly to see the relations of the concepts that were taken from these conceptually interconnected sources by using the open-source programs VOSviewer and Mendeley. Secondly, the clusters that the programs made based on the links of the keywords, were used to structure the thesis which means that concepts under the same cluster either took place at the same part of the thesis or followed each other consequently. And lastly, these outputs from the programs as clouds of keywords were merged with the diagram that shows the relation of actors of the collaborative networks in the selected case study with outputs of another open-source program called Cytoscape in the conclusion part. In this way, for the first time in literature, we could both see the actors in the network and the concepts that they bring to the general system. So the contributions to the bigger interconnected systems and notions could be seen through combining the space, functions, and global-scale concepts in this unique way. And with the reflective inputs (2), many transdisciplinary dialogues between environmental sociology and socially engaged art practices were shown. In this way of case choices, "another option" to the research was presented to both enlarge the debate with counter argumentations and reinforce the topics with various contributions with different aspects. Thus, these inputs and practices support the main arguments of the thesis where the individuals are centralized and urban commons are created based on this centralization including collaborative networks shown by a new theoretical framework of social practices where we can see the relations between actors, and the concepts of the research.