Recent critical scholarship has theorized the urban commons in terms of value regimes and practices not reducible to market logic. Specifically, it views the urban commons as a counter force to greediness, poverty, and other ills of the neoliberal urban era, but it neglects the centrality of “land.” We offer a corrective. Based on a study of the commons that is embedded in religious land, this article interrogates the tradition-rooted ethical maintenance and mundane uses of religious land in the context of urban Thailand. Buddhist temples (wats) show that monastic landlords are aware of religious land’s revenue-generating possibilities, but they resist the temptation to treat it speculatively. Instead, religious land is leased for housing, vending, and farming at a nominal rent, alongside its use for a range of religious and communal purposes. As a faith-based, non-Western, and pro-poor form of urban commons, the wats provide an understudied type of flourishing alternative to the privatized commodification and financialization of urban land. We discuss the advantages (related to the wats' stability and popular, but anti-radical, appeal) and problems (perils of repressiveness, otherworldliness, instances of corruption, and quasi-sovereignty from state power) in conceptualizing the land of faith-based organizations and their ownership and leasing practices as instances of the urban commons.

中文翻译：

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作为公地的宗教土地：泰国的佛教寺庙、寺院地主和城市贫民

最近的批判性学术根据不能还原为市场逻辑的价值体系和实践对城市公地进行了理论化。具体而言，它将城市公地视为新自由主义城市时代贪婪、贫困和其他弊病的反击力量，但却忽视了“土地”的中心地位。我们提供纠正措施。基于对宗教土地中的公地的研究，本文探讨了泰国城市背景下基于传统的道德维护和宗教土地的世俗用途。佛教寺庙（wats) 表明修道院地主意识到宗教土地的创收可能性，但他们抵制投机性对待它的诱惑。取而代之的是，宗教用地以象征性租金出租用于住房、自动售货机和农业，同时用于一系列宗教和公共目的。作为一种基于信仰的、非西方的、有利于穷人的城市公地形式，wat为城市土地的私有化商品化和金融化提供了一种尚未充分研究的繁荣替代方案。我们讨论优点（与wats相关）' 稳定和流行但反激进的吸引力）和问题（镇压的危险、超凡脱俗、腐败和国家权力的准主权）在概念化基于信仰的组织的土地及其所有权和租赁实践作为实例时的城市公地。