This is a CTP of initiative: Shareable‐Co‐Bologna&LabGov (Italy)
The content of the CTP (CTP4) is the establishment of LabGov and its evolution from a program within a single faculty to multiple faculties of the LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome. LabGov stands for ‘Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons’. LabGov was created to train a brand-new breed of “professionals and experts in the governance of urban commons” (Interview with C. Iaione, March 31st, 2016). These are young women and men able to create forms of partnerships between citizens, NGOs, public administrations, and local businesses, fostering the smart specialization of urban communities.
According to Iaione, and following the first phase of the experimental Co-City protocol, to implement a collaborative city there is the need to establish a laboratory that acts as innovation unit inside the university, providing guidelines and supervision to the process. In Italy this led to the establishment of LabGov anchored within an academic institution, understood as the cognitive centres of our society, in order to practice the values and complexities of grounding the concept of the urban commons and collaborative city in reality. LabGov begins in 2012 at LUISS ICEDD (International Center on Democracy and Democratization) within the Department of Political Sciences of the LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome. The start-up begins in the academic year 2012-2013 as an “urban clinic” (also see CTP3), a yearly non-formal optional course where experimental work in the field (the city) is seen as propaedeutic to the construction of new instruments of collaborative and polycentric urban and local governance. During the first academic year (2012-2013) the course was only open to second year university Bachelor students and Master course students from the Faculty of Political Science who work on Bologna as a case study. The second academic year (2013-2014) students focused on the city of Mantua and from the third year (2014-2015) the city of Rome and Battipaglia, a small town in the province of Salerno. From this year LabGov “urban clinic” opens as a formative course also to students of the Faculties of Economics and Law and also of first year Bachelor students therefore becoming an Athenaeum-wide project.
The choice of the city to focus is either dictated by the request of a local municipality or other urban actors, or at times LabGovers, as the students are called, make a proposal to a city actor.
The yearly optional course allows students to accumulate 4 credits for a total of 100 hours of work (50% in class time and 50% urban field work). The class time is divided in four theoretical workshops and four sessions of co-working where four professionals from different fields transfer practical competences to the students, such as web-mastering, fund-raising, community-organizing and are in charge of setting up students working groups of one and half days to solve a practical issue such as defining a municipal sustainability plan. The remaining 50 hours in the urban field are divided in 30 hours of urban gardening and 20 hours of team-work to implement the activities envisioned during class hours.
In general the outcomes of LabGov’s “urban clinics” are sustainability plans, governance instruments, such as regulations, and collaboration pacts, and any other output needed to move forward the governance of the urban commons.
Many people made this CTP possible, including the general director of LUISS Guido Carli, the pro-rectors for education and research, the academic senate, and the responsible for the innovation programs in education. The shift of LabGov from single to inter-faculty was a request from the general director, whilst the responsible for the innovation programs in education requested that the program be open also to first year Bachelor students within Luiss Guido Carli. This request was in line with the idea of embedding the “urban clinic” and the concepts it fosters so that students “grow” with the program and as they grow cognitive capital and know-how on the Co-City approach, they are able to supervise and lead by themselves the new and younger generations. This way the cognitive capital built each academic year is retained rather than lost.
The shift came as a result of observing the reaction and feedback of the Political Science students already engaged in the urban clinic. These students simply had a good time during the clinic while at the same time having an impact on the city. So why not giving the same opportunity to students from other faculties. At the same time disciplines, such as Economics and Law, are needed to carry out some of the main practical outcomes of the urban clinics, such as the city sustainability plan and the administrative and juridical embedding needed to make the Co-City approach work. Finally the organizers saw mutual benefits in mixing polyedric students of Political Science to students of Economic and Law who are more hard-wired in their discipline.
Bologna was the first urban clinic, to which followed Co-Mantua in 2013-2014. LabGov students focused on the theme of culture as a common good, a project commissioned by the Mantua Chamber of Commerce. For instance, LabGov interns, participated actively during all the phases of the Mantova project. They supported project design and field implementation. They handled internal and external communication, organized the workshops and conferences, and facilitated the different project working groups, which, for instance, created the Collaboration Pact, the Collaboration Toolkit, and the Sustainability Plan for Co-Mantua.
In the academic year 2014-2015, LabGov dealt with territorial governance, understood as a social, economic, institutional and democratic technology that saws back together territorial government by interpreting the "territory as a common good”, with a focus on the environment, agriculture and food. This idea was in line with the main theme of the Milan Expo dedicate to the role of food production and consumption in our society. LabGov partnered with Coldiretti (Italy’s associations of agricultural entrepreneurs), Rural Hub e Zappata Romana to develop a new value chains rural and urban agriculture in Rome.
In the same year LabGov started Co-Battipaglia with the aim of supporting an urban strategic plan for the city with collaborative principles. The crucial aspect of this Co-City process is that the city council of Battipaglia has been dismissed in April 2014 over mafia allegations and after a few weeks assigned architect Massimo Alvisi to design the city’s new urban strategic plan. LabGov has organized two debates in the city: “Creative Battipaglia” and “Public Battipaglia”. During the debates, participants discussed the possible ways in which the city could build its future based on education and knowledge, re-appropriating the former De Amicis school, the city castle “Castelluccio”, one of the many former tobacco companies “Tabacchificio” dating back to the 1900s.
In this academic year (2015-2016) LabGov kept the focus on the city of Rome with a project working directly with community associations at the sub-municipality level aiming at coordinating different collaborative spaces in the city
Related events:
Publication of Iaione, C. (2015) “Governing the Urban Commons” in Italian Journal of Public Law Vol. 7(1):170-221
Publication of Iaione, C. & Cannavò, P. (2015) “The Collaborative and Polycentric Governance of the Urban and Local Commons” In Urban Pamphleteer Issue 5 on Global Education for Urban Futures, UCL Urban Laboratory, London, UK.
Some of the problems that came with shifting LabGov to an inter-faculty setting were depending on the heterogeneity of the group. During the first and second years only student from the second year onwards were allowed to join the urban clinic. These students who were close to ending their university carrier, had more skills, competences and maturity, then the younger Bachelors who joined in the third academic year who for obvious reasons were less cohesive, less prepared, less clear in their objectives and vision. For example, according to Iaione, who himself taught economics, these students receive an education that is quite determined by mainstream economics education where there are strong dichotomies such as the market as alternative to the State. Whereas the concept of the “urban commons” and the conflict among urban policies and their legitimacy is something more palatable for students of Law and Political Science. Although it is the field of the economists that is most called into question within the collaborative city paradigm, these are the students that struggle the most.
In this vein, according to Iaione, LabGov should be preceded by a theoretical mainstream course that introduces students, in their first year of university, to the principles of shared and collaborative governance, as alternatives to the dichotomies of mainstream economics. A metaphor for this is that before sawing new seeds (the knowledge of the urban clinic) you have to plough the ground (a theoretical course teaching the ethos of civic collaboration) and without this ploughing LabGov will not flourish.
One of Iaione’s dreams is that of establishing a Chair on the Urban Commons within LUISS GC University. Iaione sees this as a fundamental step for the institutionalization of the teaching and practice of the urban commons within the university, allowing for an adequate amount of study hours dedicated to learning the foundational concepts of the commons and civic governance. The Chair has not been established yet for a number of reasons: “in some cases the importance of such as course is not understood, there’s resistance to change and path-dependency, frictions between who should carry out the course” (Interview with C. Iaione, March 31st, 2016).
This CTP happened as the organizers and the students realized the benefits of extending the course to other faculties. The organizers had already envisioned that the “urban clinic” should be self-organized by different generations of students, in such a way that older, more mature and skilled students with a developed cognitive capital and know-how about the Co-City approach, are able to supervise and lead new and younger generations from different faculties.
Some years after the emergence of LabGov the organizers gradually understand, as they work, how to resolve some of the issues explained above (see among others contestation). It is a desire of them to move towards a LabGov Co-City prototype and model that can be used by other universities and cities that are seriously interested in learning from process of co-city making rather than using it as a marketing tool. They also understood that working on the same city for more than one year is important. Rome is a big city full of complexities and opportunities that require more time to be comprehended. It is also the city where most of the organizers come from. LabGov’s 2016-2017 urban clinic will continue the work done in Rome the previous year. This year the organizers also decided to work directly with community associations at the sub-municipality level. This approach is also used in “urban clinics” in the United States, however, in Rome working without the backup of authorities was not perceived in a positive way, as if civic duty without municipal backup had little value. But Iaione has a different opinion and nuances this idea: “Whether or not institutional backing is present does not automatically determine the quality of the impact of the urban clinic’s outcome on the area of interest. Actually, having a local authority as your main actor, the outcome may remain locked in a municipal officer’s desk” (Interview with C. Iaione, March 31st, 2016).
The main lesson of this CTP for LabGov is that the values and ethos underlying the collaborative city framework need to be instilled in students from the very beginning if LabGov’s goals to achieve the “fourth mission of the university” is to be met. This mission is that university is involved in community organising and in promoting social and economic development towards transitioning urban and rural areas to co-cities. This idea spurred by LabGovs’ story and learning so far, was synthesized in a recent paper (2015) published by UCL’s Urban Laboratory.
Iaione’s dream for LabGov is for it to become an independently run self-organized association that continues its direct relationship with the university, the municipal innovators and facilitating field-work in cities.
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