• In an era of rapid urbanization and changing land use patterns, how are commons imagined and reimagined?  What forms do they take, and are there newer forms of urban commons that are emerging?
• What roles do such spaces play in supporting urban and peri-urban lifestyles?  
• How does the conceptualization of urban commons differ from the more widely studied case of rural commons?

• How have urban commons evolved over time, and in what social-ecological contexts? 
• What can we learn from these stories of the past that may be of relevance in governing the continuously transitioning urban and peri-urban commons of the present day?

• Given the massive push today towards urban automation, robotics, and smart cities, what role do traditional and new urban commons play in such spaces? 
• What role do these technologies play in determining social ecological relationships around urban and peri-urban commons? 

• How do social movements emerge within an urban commons?
• Where are social movements most efficient while attempting to influence urban commons governance?
• How do social movements work to protect and improve urban commons?
• Under what conditions are social protest and social movements prevented or precluded from occurring?

• What is the range of approaches that may be used to study urban commons? 
• How do they cut across disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological challenges to provide answers to the governance challenges we face today? 
• Is there opportunity to standardize how we study case studies around urban commons to generate mid-range theories?

• How can we place nature and nature based solutions at the forefront of approaches to governing and managing urban commons?
• Are there successful examples of such ecologically prioritized engagement with urban commons – how have these functioned and what challenges have they faced? 

• How are urban and peri-urban commons perceived, appropriated, and governed across the gender divide? 
• What are the differential challenges that are encountered around urban commons on account of gendered gaps within society? 
• What implications do they pose for evolving sustainable and equitable strategies towards urban common pool resource governance? 

• What are the lessons emerging about urban commons in terms of how they are appropriated, managed and governed across cities of the global south and global north? 
• What are the commonalities, and how they differ across the north-south divide? 
• What implications do these commonalities and differences pose towards the way we understand global urban commons? 

Rapid urbanization has often taken place at the expense of rural resources and the communities in which these resources are embedded.  Urban development is often premised solely on generating economic returns, and is considered to be at loggerheads with the vibrancy of rural areas.  Rural ecological services, however, are important to sustainable cities; perhaps more importantly, the cultural heritage and social capital rooted in rural communities are a coherent part of a city’s identity.  How to manage and revitalize rural resources amid urbanization so as to attain a sustainable rural-urban interface is a major challenge for many big cities, particularly those in Asia.  To what extent a commoning approach can help manage and revitalize rural resources?  What are the opportunities and challenges for practicing commoning in the rural-urban interface?