This is a CTP of initiative: Shareable‐Co‐Bologna&LabGov (Italy)
This CTP (CTP1) is about the process of putting the concept of the “urban commons” on the agenda. The conceptualization of urban commons (further explained below) draws on the logic of common pool resources that were more typically associated with the sphere of natural resources. At the core, what will be later called LabGov and the Co-city, is the conscious attempt to re-appropriate the term and translate into the urban space and dwelling on its importance for today’s cities. This CTP is grounded in the personal experiences, academic carrier and applied work of Christian Iaione, LabGov’s Coordinator. Iaione has had a long-term interest in local collaboration, beginning with his undergraduate in Law at the LUISS Guido Carli University where he focuses on local collaboration between enterprises for the realisation of public infrastructure and later on local public entrepreneurship as a means to withstand global competition. He continues this work by studying the local government and the subsidiarity principle at the faculty of Law and Economics of La Sapienza University. The key interest of his PhD was to map the sectors where local authorities should focus on in order to stimulate local attractiveness by enabling collaborative and collective action in order to reduce consumer demand and multiply value added, generating new local common wealth (Publication of Local Public Entrepreneurship, 2008).
He continued his studies by obtaining a LL.M. (Masters of Law) at the New York University School of Law (2007-2008) and his research activities as Emile Noël Fellow at the NYU School of Law Jean Monnet Center (2006-2007) and visiting scholar at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service the year later (2007-2008). Here he conducted a study on mobility as one of the fields in which local authorities can more easily promote the development of practices and solutions centered on collaboration and inter-individual cooperation (Publication of The Tragedy of Urban Roads, 2009).
This originated the idea to consider urban roads as urban commons in the sense of functional goods to the welfare of the local community. It included that quality of urban life and the maintenance and or regeneration of urban spaces must be an alliance between institutions, civil society and community in all its possible articulations. Iaione realized that a similar argument could be made for other local public services, such as water service, waste management services, energy services. As later stated in a 2016 paper that systematizes the Co-City protocol and its foundational pillars “the idea of urban commons concerns all those urban spaces and services we consider ‘local commons’ or ‘common spaces and services’. It is not necessary that the formal ownership of common goods be public, in the sense of being in the care or supervision of some public administration. The ownership of a commons can also be in private hands, but it must be characterized by the necessity of guaranteeing universal access and use by the need to involve community members in their production and management. Thus, the community includes anybody who can contribute to the survival, care, and conservation of urban commons” (Iaione, 2016:417).
But the road to achieve this is complex and should start from the direct embodied experience that people have with public spaces. Iaione goes on to say “When one wakes up in the morning and uses tap water to shower, one is not really aware that this tap water is a commons, coming to us through a service network, but when one steps out of the door and sees a broken bench or a fallen tree then the first thought is the Municipality should do something about this!” Iaione sees the second as generating a more direct experience with people and mutual trust, the one society should be acting upon to start a process of civic engagement towards the common management of urban spaces, where instead of saying “the municipality should think about this” people say “I should do something about it”.
It was at NYU that he developed the theoretical framework for local public entrepreneurship (2008), which is the basis of the CO-Mantova project and the idea of the city as a commons (See CTP on LabGov).
References
Iaione, C. (2016) “The Co-City: Sharing, Collaborating, Cooperating, and Commoning in the City” in American Journal of Economics and Sociology Vol. 75(2):415-455
From a theoretical standpoint, this CTP is strongly influenced by several key authors illustrating the principle of polycentricism in governance. Among many others, Robert Warren (1968) on the governance of metropolitan areas and Vincent Ostrom (1972) counterpoising collaboration to competition in the management of common resources and reflects on the possibility of a ‘third way’ to manage common resources, rooted in self-government. Elinor Ostrom (1990 and 2010) supports and extends this principle to the “commons” in natural resource management in both urban and rural areas and the possibility of engendering different governance arrangements between the public, the private sectors and other organizations at other levels for the polycentric governance of “common pool” resources. Sheila Foster (2011) who was the first scholar worldwide to lay out a comprehensive theoretical framework for the urban commons, framing community gardens and BIDs as possible urban commons governance mechanisms.
The conceptual step made to extend this concept to the urban realm is echoed in other studies on urban spaces as commons by considering their use and social utility. For instance in the Manifesto on Urban Commons by Ugo Mattei (2011), the square is an urban common because it is “a place for social access and exchange”.
Other inspiring references for the common goods and urban commons in Italy are Marco Cammelli’s work on public administration, Gregorio Arena’s on active citizenship, and the constitutional law scholar Piero Calamandrei on the Community-State.
The Urban Commons are also closely connected to the regeneration of urban space, a fundamental theme of social inclusion policies of 21st Century cities, articulated in what town planners call “urban well-being”. A key Italian reference in this respect is Paola Bellaviti’s works on the same topic.
Between 2008 and 2014 Iaione was also Chief Editor of Labsus – Laboratorio per la sussidiarietà, a legal-sociological journal of Italian movements dedicated to active citizenship, innovation in public administration, national services cooperatives, Italy’s largest environmental association (Legambiente), consumer rights movements and the Italian Volunteers Movement (M.O.V.I.). Iaione published many foundational articles taken from ongoing studies on the urban commons on this platform.
There are many events that influenced this CTP according to Iaione, although it is impossible to date this CTP since it has been a continuous evolution. During an interview for the Shareable Network he recalls how he grew up in the south of Italy but with an Anglo-Saxon imprinting with both parents that lived in the US in the Sixties and came back to become Vice-Mayors of two small towns near Avellino. The whole family would move back to the US after the catastrophic events of the earthquake that affected his city, Avellino, and the whole country in the Eighties. As he recalls in the interview “My mother, my brothers and I fled to New York and New Jersey to stay with friends and relatives. My father decided to stay in Italy to take care of his city and his citizens” (Bauwens, 2015). This lesson in sense of duty influenced Iaione, as well as experiencing the US as a welcoming place for those seeking help. It is indeed in the US that Iaione made key breakthroughs in the elaboration of the urban commons.
Another important related event that preceded this CTP is the experience of practicing the urban commons while Iaione was studying at a UC Berkeley Extension Program in 1999. During this time, he worked with other students and professors in taking care of the university’s urban garden. Collective doing is based on “the assumption of a responsibility towards other unique human beings and towards the common good. Citizens feel they are responsible people. Not in the punitive sense, but in the sense of being accountable. It is a question of citizens who feel invested with a power. The power to do something to give a collective response to problems with our own daily individual behavior”. (Interview with Christian Iaione, March 10th 2016).
This CTP evolved into the Co-City project thanks to the enlightening encounter, that happened in 2011, with Marco Cammelli (professor and prominent scholar of Administrative Law and at the time president of the Fondazione Del Monte di Bologna and Ravenna, a private foundation supporting local economic development and local community projects and head of the scientific committee of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Imola). Cammelli commissioned Iaione a research project on civic duties and public responsibilities of actors outside the formal institutions in Bologna. This research will generate the background paper for the first seminar on “The City as a Commons” (See CTP on the 11 December 2011 seminar).
This CTP evolved into the Co-City project a process that began in December 2011 also thanks to Professor Leonardo Morlino, Director of the LUISS International Center on Democracy and Democratization. He believed in Iaione’s early intuitions that it was possible to extend the concept of the commons to the urban sphere and make this “not just the object of relatively small university funded projects but a larger vision where this theme becomes the object of large commercial research projects funded by international science agencies and the results published in internationally known academic journals”. From an educational standpoint Giovanni Lo Storto, the Director General of LUISS, was key because he understood the importance of using fieldwork experiments as an educational instrument for both Law and Economics university student. Both are now part of LabGov’s Scientific Committee along with Professor Sheila Foster (Director of the Fordham Urban Law Center and LabGov US) and Professor Tine De Moor (Utrecht University, President of the International Association for the Study of the Commons).
Related publications:
Iaione, C. (2008) “Local Public Entrepreneurship and Judicial Intervention in a Euro-American and Global Perspective”, 7 Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev. 215, http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_globalstudies/vol7/iss2/3
Iaione, C. (2009) “The Tragedy of Urban Roads: Saving Cities from Choking, Calling on Citizens to Combat Climate Change.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 37(3): 889–951. http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol37/iss3/7/
There was no clearly distinguishable contestation event in this CTP.
Within the logic of the urban commons there is a critique to contemporary disengaged citizens in Global North cities. Iaione feels that this can be reversed through the direct embodied experience that people can have in public spaces. As he expressed fostering a sense of mutual trust among people is important to limit the attitude of “the municipality should think about this”, but rather people foster the one where “I should do something about it”. This tension, however, did not manifest itself in the form of any clear contestation around the development of the concept of the ‘urban commons’. Iaione followed his intuition and managed to gain support by linking up with other like-minded people, rather than being intensively engaged with contesters that he had to convince. This is also further addressed in the section on learning.
This CTP is the result of Iaione’s personal and academic choices as they unfolded. The intuitions that led him to this CTP could not be, in this sense, anticipated and are inextricably linked to his personality and history as they were lived. This happened at a time where topics like social norms and behavioural law and economics were renewed subjects of interest in the US. In Italy, however, scholars were only beginning to debunk two governance myths: a) the public sector is fundamentally ill designed to address the challenges that the 21st century is bringing and can no longer deliver services alone; and b) the private sector is always more efficient than the public sector in delivering services and therefore the public sector should hand over the management of these services to the private sector and make private undertakings always compete among each other. His work on ‘urban commons’ fits well in this context. In summary one could also interpret the process as follows: Iaione followed an intuition rooted in his personal experience as academic in the U.S. and Italy and attuned with evolving scholarly thinking. He anticipated on his intuition by continuously investing energy moving forward the thinking and practice of the urban commons.
One learning point coming from this CTP, according to Iaione, is that if you want to change something you have to change it from the inside by finding those who are willing to work with you and you need to work humbly, transparently but with a low profile (and sometimes below the radar). Throughout his academic and professional carrier, he found alliance and support in people that were in line with values of collaboration, interdependence of individual behaviours and collective well-being, which he wanted to pursue and enact in the urban environment. Back in 2008 it happened that many people Iaione talked to about collaborative governance did not understand the importance of the urban commons, or were not interested. A second learning point is that it takes a lot of patience and acceptance that things do not always happen at the speed and form that one would prefer to. The important aspect in this process according to Iaione, is to not compromise or ‘water down’ the fundamental values and principles that one wants to bring forward but to accept what can be done now with the means available and accept imperfection.
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