In Seeing Like a Commons, Joshua Lockyer demonstrates how a growing group of people have, over the last eighty years, deliberately built Celo Community, a communal settlement on 1,200 acres of commonly owned land in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Joshua Lockyer highlights the potential for intentional communities like Celo to raise awareness of global interconnectivity and structural inequalities, enabling people and communities to become better stewards and citizens of both local landscapes and global commons.

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Seeing Like a Commons is a worthy addition to the scholarly literature on intentional communities. It focuses on Celo, an 80-year-old, 1,200-acre intentional community located in rural North Carolina…. Lockyer sees Celo as a dynamic, ongoing, and largely successful social experiment. He uses the concept of the community as a commons to explain Celo, defining the commons as both a resource (e.g., land) and as an internal social system for managing the resource by a group that shares values and feelings of community identity. He draws heavily on the work of Elinor Ostrom, discussing Celo’s implementation of several of her commons design principles. Lockyer’s book has relevance for students across the social sciences who are interested in social change as implemented by a long-standing alternative community. Recommended. General readers through faculty.