This is a CTP of initiative: Shareable‐Co‐Bologna&LabGov (Italy)
This CTP (CTP3) is about the first experimental workshops in Bologna triggered by the need to put the theory of urban common goods into practice following the Imola seminar of December 2011. These workshops follow on the starting up of the Co-Bologna initiative (see CTP on that) but precede the Bologna regulation of May 2014 and are conducive to it.
Between September 2012 and December 2013 a series of experimental workshops were organized in three neighbourhoods of the City of Bologna. The experimentation process was managed by the team working at the web magazine Labsus (Iaione was at that time executive director of the magazine) and the local NGO, Antartide. An administrative task force was established and it was trained in an informal and interactive way in order to engage and motivate city officials to work with communities and the project team on the ground in this experimentation phase.
Three experimental workshops (later called ‘urban clinics’) were set up for the purpose of:
The designated field locations, chosen in cooperation with the city, after a mapping exercise through local media analysis, were an abandoned area (square and building) in the outskirts of Bologna (Piazza Spadolini), a green space in a semi-peripheral area (Parco della Zucca) and a street in the city historic centre of Bologna (Via Santo Stefano).
The experimental workshops were the second result of the collaboration between Marco Cammelli and Christian Iaione and had been possible through funding from Fondazione Del Monte di Bologna and Ravenna (whose President is Marco Cammelli). The first result of their collaboration was to bring the law on micro-local-interest projects to the attention of the City Administration.
Among other circumstances that enabled the experimental workshops related is the realisation, by the City Administration, of the many examples of shared, collaborative, cooperative or polycentric management/governance schemes in Italy. This served as an impulse for the Administration and the Mayor of Bologna, advised by Giacomo Capuzzimati (the director general of the City of Bologna) to take on board the concept of collaborative city governance by accepting to become part of an innovative governance process.
Summarising, the first experimental workshops happened because of the convergence of an emerging conducive environment for public-civic collaboration (in the form of new decrees and laws in Italy), a forward looking Administration that believed in the potential of civic engagement research study on the urban commons, the complicity and support of a private foundation with social solidarity, cultural and scientific development purposes.
This CTP was determined by both CTP (the realisation of the importance of the urban commons) and CTP 2 (the Imola seminar). These CTPs contain elements that are internal to this social innovation project (the seminar) but also external ones (the social network of scholars, entrepreneurs and city officials that made the personal trajectory of Iaione). The timescale of CTP 1 is large and dates back to Iaione’s experience of his father choosing to stay in the city of Avellino to help it recover after the earthquake in the Eighties. It continues throughout the late nineties and 2000s through his academic career (see CTP 1) and it overlaps with the timescale of the second CTP (2008-2011), this then feeds into CTP 5 and this CTP.
In the second part of 2013, the outcomes of the three experimental workshops in the abandoned city square and building, the peripheral green space and the central city street, were analysed to understand facilitating and hindering factors towards the common use of such spaces. The outcomes were then synthesized in key guidelines by an internal working group of five people who drafted the regulation on the basis of the guidelines extracted by the experimental workshops. The draft of the regulation was then subject to public consultation and validated by a committee of national and international Administrative Law experts. In February 2014, the City Executive committee adopted the draft text of the Bologna regulation on public/civic collaboration for the urban commons that was later discussed within the City Council and approved with minor changes and no contrary vote in May 2014 (See CTP on Co-Bologna).
Related events:
Municipality of Bologna (2014) Regulation on Collaboration between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. http://www.comune.bologna.it/media/files/bolognaregulation.pdf
There was no clearly distinguishable contestation event in this CTP.
The experimentation process was managed by locally rooted organizations (the team working at the web magazine Labsus and the local NGO, Antartide). An important element was the focus on training and motivating city officials to work with communities and the project team on the ground. There were enough people interested to take part in the workshops. The collaboration between the actors in the experimental workshops did not involve contestation. Also the choice of the field locations was a rather harmonious process that was chosen in cooperation with the city. It was prepared well and followed from a mapping exercise through local media analysis.
The experimental workshops were rooted in the theory of experimental governance, where public policy is made through practical experiments rather than legislative assemblies. In this sense actors do not anticipate the CTP, but it is rather part and parcel of a designed process where experimentation is required to agglomerate knowledge and understand what works and what does not work in the current regulatory framework.
The first workshops in Bologna were identified as a CTP because, retrospectively, after the Bologna regulation was approved, the team working at Labsus realized the importance of the process that generated the Bologna regulation.
The revision of this experience led to the steps of the later called Co-City Protocol, namely: the establishment of an innovation unit to exercise the governance of the commons (at the time embodied by Labsus), the mapping phase of actors, material and immaterial resources for which there is a demand for collaborative governance or where a supply already exists and what the similar experiences of resources managed through collaboration. Thirdly, the experimentation phase, where ground experimentations are realised. Fourthly, the governance prototyping phase, different for every experimentation, where the governance outputs of the process are prototyped through a co-design process. The testing and evaluating phase and sixth is the possible modelling of the prototype phase if and only if the prototype overcomes the evaluation phase.
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