Urban Water Commons investigates how designed water systems can become sites of collective stewardship and self-organisation. Its principal case is the Water Gardens in Hemel Hempstead, where landscape infrastructure, public use and local organisation intersect around a historically significant urban water environment.

The research uses Ostrom’s social–ecological-systems framework and combines archival evidence, site observation, interviews, social-media topic analysis and network analysis. It identifies leadership, recreation, knowledge sharing and online networking as mechanisms that can strengthen collective action. These mechanisms are examined alongside the physical characteristics and institutional history of the water system.

The project connects urban metabolism with commoning practices by showing that infrastructure performance depends on social relationships as well as technical design. It contributes to the Lab’s interest in agency by examining how residents, organisations, ecological processes and inherited landscape structures collectively shape the maintenance and meaning of an urban resource system.