This is a CTP of initiative: Shareable‐Co‐Bologna&LabGov (Italy)
The seminar of December 11th 2011 called ‘The City as Urban Commons’ in Imola was a CTP (CTP2) in the Co-City project because it laid the theoretical and cognitive foundations of Co-Bologna, a process to “design a policy and regulatory framework re-shaping the relationship between inhabitants and the local administration with regard to urban resources and services” (Iaione & Foster, 2016).
The seminar was a moment to test reactions of relevant actors to the results of a research study on understanding what collaborative city governance might mean for the city of Bologna and bringing together public, private, civil society and university actors. After this seminar, the Mayor of Bologna, under the advice of Giacomo Capuzzimati (the director general of the City of Bologna) participated in the seminar and decided to take on board the concept of collaborative city governance by accepting to become part of an innovative governance process, later called Co-Bologna (See CTP on Co-Bologna).
The seminar had been possible thanks to one key person in the Co-City project: Marco Cammelli (at the time president of the Fondazione Del Monte di Bologna and Ravenna, a private foundation supporting local community projects). At the beginning of 2011, Marco Cammelli, with funding from Cassa di Risparmio of Imola, asked Christian Iaione to be in charge of a research project on civic duties and public responsibilities of actors outside of formal institutions in Bologna.
Iaione’s study called “City and the Commons” was the background paper of the seminar and was later published in Italian as “La città come bene comune” on the scientific journal Aedon in 2013. The study mapped the third of the three key elements falling under the concept of an urban commons according to the Co-City Protocol that is the examples of shared, collaborative, cooperative or polycentric management/governance schemes in Italy (the other two key elements being a common/shared resource and the users/communities using and managing or benefiting from the resource). This served as a source of inspiration for the City of Bologna. It showed how many existing public policies on green spaces, urban creativity, the use of urban roads and other forms of public space, among others, are very similar to an urban commons approach, except called with a different name. The mapping process determined strategic guidelines of action for a City-laboratory where the theory on urban common goods could be tested.
For the subsequent step (also see the CTP on Co-Bolonga) the role of the Mayor of Bologna and his advisor Giacomo Capuzzimati were also critical in the co-production process. The foundations for this were laid in the seminar by the presence of the Mayor of Bologna.
Trending topic of the commons among scholars and municipalities. The seminar happened at a time where the topic of the commons was not only trending among scholars but also municipalities were increasingly confronted with the introduction of decrees and laws on public-civic collaboration. For instance, section 23 of law decree no 185/2008 on micro-local-interest projects, passed into Law no 2/2009, introduced the possibility for local authorities to make use of an effective form of cooperation between citizens and public administrations, in fulfilment of the spirit of subsidiarity, in order to realize micro-local-interest projects of easy implementation.
In April 2011 the City of Bologna, which was managed at that time by an administrative czar appointed by the central government, a few months before the election of the new mayor, approved a regulation on the realisation of urban micro-projects promoting the enhancement of public spaces by and for the civil society. This choice was the first result of the collaboration between Marco Cammelli and Christian Iaione. In fact, after reading a first draft of Iaione’s study (who had been advocating for the implementation of such law as a way to spark governance of the urban commons on the columns of Labsus, an online web-magazine, since 2009), Cammelli brought this law to the attention of the Administration.
The seminar built on this momentum by triggering the need to put the theory of urban common goods into practice through a series of experimental workshops were organized in three neighbourhoods of the City of Bologna (see CTP on the first experimental workshops).
Previous to the seminar Iaione published many articles reflecting on the urban commons from a legal and juridical perspective on an Italian legal-sociological web magazine (Labsus). For instance, in March 2010 he writes “Everyday Subsidiarity” on the potential of recognizing the role of active citizens and their associated and autonomous action towards the collective good as an alternative right to that entrusted to the State. In the same year he reflects on water as a common good, and in 2009 on the limits of participative democracy and another on social housing and social impact finance for the common good.
Related events:
Publication of Iaione, C. (2012) “Citta’ e Beni Comuni” in G. Arena, C. Iaione, L’Italia dei Beni Comuni, Carocci, Roma
Iaione, C. (2013) La Citta’ come Bene Comune” in Aedon Numero 1 Issn 1127-1345 Iaione, C. (2010) “La Sussidiarietà Quotidiana”, in Labsus.org, http://www.labsus.org/2011/03/la-sussidiarieta-quotidiana-2/
Iaione, C. (2010) “L’Acqua come Bene Comune”, in Labsus.org, http://www.labsus.org/2010/05/lacqua-come-bene-comune/
Iaione, C. (2010) “Social housing and Finance at the service of the Common Good”, in Labsus.org http://www.labsus.org/2009/12/social-housing-e-finanza-a-servizio-del-bene-comune/
There was no moment of contestation before, during or after the seminar. The topic of the seminar, however, would later (today) become a source of tension, not just in Bologna but in many cities who are dealing with active citizenship and civic collaboration, the latter was, as a more general principle used to define the act of people using free time to take care of urban goods. “Today we know that active citizenship is more at the purview of the middle classes, while we want to understand if civic collaboration can move beyond class divide” (Interview with C. Iaione, March 29th, 2016). Civic collaboration is rooted in ideas of self-development and self-government and also civic duties of those who have the means and therefore the responsibility to co-govern the city. This is at the core of Co-Bologna, where key actors to reach are unemployed people, people who lack basic livelihood resources and the intention is creating forms of self-governance that are sustainable.
The seminar was planned to be a critical turning point although the organizers could not entirely foresee how it would unfold. It was kept small (twenty or so people participated) and it unleashed the creative power to initiate the writing of the Bologna regulation and the beginning of LabGov as an urban clinic within the faculty of Political Science of the LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome (See CTP on LabGov).
The seminar catalyzed the amount of cognitive learning gained till that moment around the theory of cities as urban commons, which then led to a practical experimentation on three urban commons. The seminar was also key to identify the institutional innovators within the Municipality who are willing to be engaged in governance experimentations in the streets and learn from practice.
Recapturing the formation within this CTP shows that a number of conditions helped to make it a moment that was indeed critical as it was also planned to be:
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