by Paola Todisco | Mar 13, 2019 | Event, Luiss LabGov 2018-2019, The Urban Media Lab
Save the date: on 15th and 16th March will take place the third weekend of the EDU@LabGov Urban Clinic in Luiss Guido Carli University!
Friday 15th March from 16pm to 18pm in the Luiss Campus, we will host a lecture of professor Christian Iaione about Urban Law and Policy, and we will hear the testimony of lawyer Nico Maravia from law firm Pavia & Ansaldo and of the dr. Paola Marzi from the Municipality of Rome, who will speak about the Regulation on the urban gardens that she wrote for the Municipality of Rome.
Saturday 16th march from 10am to 17pm, will be held the third session of co-working. It will be divided into two part. First, we will hear Pasquale Tedesco’s experience: he is an expert in environmental sustainability, sustainable and synergic agriculture and in the field of urban and social gardens. In the second part of co-working the EDU LabGov team, thanks to the guide of Chiara De Angelis and Daniela Patti, we will speak about the process of design focusing on the user journey maps. In this way, the LabGovers will analyze all the passages of their project, they will answer to the needs of the ‘personas’ (the users object of their project) and they will define the various sections and the categories of contents of the platform that they are developing.
The next meetings are very important in order to complete and improve the
idea that it is taking form more and more.
Stay Tuned!
by Margherita Valle | Feb 23, 2018 | The Urban Media Lab, ULCR San José Lab 2018
[…]the concentration of people and events in time and space is a prerequisite to make anything happen, but more importantly are what activities are allowed to develop […]
In Life between buildings[1] are outlined the applications that must exist in the architectural proposals, so that human being begins to appropriate them. By extrapolating this analysis and relying on the concept established in The Right to the City[2], where it is considered that the gentrification caused by urban processes implies an impact on the present and the future of humanity[3]. The construction and strengthening of social structures that complement the dynamics of interaction of the different actors begins to make sense.
This concept of change of social structure is broad and, at the same time, complicated to define by different actors involved in the subject[4] Therefore, related processes that can be articulated from the academy result in the proposal of systematic variables that, far from wanting to intercede to achieve the purpose of a change of structure, what they seek is to detonate a collective process which add to the existing.
Proposal of social integration.
In this search to promote the use of space and social interaction, the approach to the community Barrio Pinto and its surroundings is proposed in the South of the canton of San Pedro de Montes de Oca, in the province of San Jose, Costa Rica; whose radius of action is located between the kilometer close to the Campus of Universidad Latina. This context contains many different realities. On the one hand, the central avenue has an established structure of commerce and services, in addition is the road that connects the center of the country with the Inter-American route, therefore, highly charged with vehicular flow.
This situation disappears entering avenue 2, 4 and 6. Residential use is giving space to the commerce and offices, but that still encloses a residential range that gives life to the parks of his around. This mutation of the space is reflected in the offer of related services between traditional commercial systems, such as tailors, sodas and informal commerce, as well as other emerging elements (biodegradable cleaning products).
Is under these dynamics – between the behavior of the inhabitants of the sector and the users of the services that are beginning to develop in the area – that the interaction between students of the area and the institutions (who are unaware of the processes, routes, services) arises. For example, there is a coffee shop that offers bike rental per hour and per day, as well as the organization of recreational circuits in the sector.
Then, the question arisen is: how to provide a tool to citizenship that allows articulation in the public space between the collective memory of a specific place and emerging uses that change the image of the city?
It is at this point, where the definition of common goods[5] and Collaborative Economy[6] (Cañigueral, 2014), together with the use of the technological tool Agora PIC (Plataforma de Integración Ciudadana, 2017) developed by the NGO team PIC, that these are taken as the basis of the research, to identify the possible elements to be taken into account, and to define a path that provides information on tangible and intangible variables. Trying to unify the social processes of the inhabitants of the sector, with visitors and users of the different activities in the radio, near to the community of Barrio Pinto.
Within the concrete analysis of the peculiarities of the community, the gap that exists between space of the Square Máximo Fernández- on the north side of Franklin D. Roosevelt School – and El Retiro Park (650 meters Southwest of Máximo Fernández Square) -, as a hub that makes possible the social connection of a situation different from the current, whose goal is immersed, as Gehl points out[7] – is taken into account, to generate not only the space of transition, but of interaction.
Citizen participation has been necessary for the construction of this project. Across workshops and interviews, as well as different visits to the community to establish collaborative and individual services[8], the rescue of collective memory, stories and accounts of the citizen for the visibility of the human and sensory part of the area began, as well as the delimitation of the emerging uses that change the dynamic preset in the area, and generate a social movement toward the appropriation of common space[9].
Conclusion of a job, start of a route.
In conclusion, it is possible to counteract the thinking and analysis of Gehl[10], about the dynamics of use of public spaces, with the contributions of Zaida Muxí and Joseph María Montaner[11] on the substantial changes that surround the phenomenology of the city for the adequate enjoyment and use of the various variables of the Commons. Processes that lead to interpret the change of the image of the city must occur in an intrapersonal way, understanding that this isolated element is part of an articulated social system[12].
On this premise, it is part of this personal relationship, of collective memory and the individual task, for the strengthening of pre-existing social layers. It may not induce a community to take a change in its structure, but it strengthens when an external user can deviate from their daily life to rediscover its immediate context. For this reason, and waiting for the use of the technological tool (Ágora PIC[13]) to boost social skills to community, this intervention has been completed with the start of a journey raised with the student community of the Universidad Latina.
On this basis, we should start from this relationship between the collective memory and the individual task, to strengthen the pre-existing social layers. It is not possible to induce a community to adopt a modification in its structure, but it can be strengthened, when an external user can get away from their everyday life to rediscover their immediate context. For this reason, the use of the Ágora PIC technological tool was envisaged so that it could stimulate the social capacities of community making, ending this intervention with the beginning of a journey through the community.
A circuit that seeks, every four months, that is to say with the opening of the academic semester, to offer the newly admitted student the possibility of knowing their immediate context, and at the same time generate interaction with the dynamics of their area and with its inhabitants. This wants to contribute to the creation of a collective memory and local participatory networks that bring the academy closer to its own territory.
Il progetto pilota del LabGov Costa Rica comincia da esercizi accademici mirati che hanno l’intenzione de rispondere alla domanda: come facilitare uno strumento alla cittadinanza che permetta l’articolazione tra i beni comuni spaziali e la memoria collettiva di un determinato luogo; con una particolare attenzione agli usi emergenti che mutano rapidamente il volto frenetico della capitale e il ricordo di un passato, non troppo passato, campestre e bucolico? Come possiamo conservare la memoria dei beni comuni intangibili promuovendo contemporanemente l’hic et nunc dei commons tangibili attuali?
[1] Gehl, J. (2011). Life between buildings: using public space. Washington, DC: Island Press.
[2] Lefebvre, H. (1973). Le Droit à la ville. Paris: Ed. Anthropos.
[3] Costes, L. (2012). Del ‘derecho a la ciudad’ de Henri Lefebvre a la universalidad. Urban, 1-12.
[4] Lucas, M.A. (2006). Estructura social. La realidad de las sociedades avanzadas. Madrid: Pearson Education.
[5] Fundación Heinrich Böll (2008). Genes, bytes y emisiones: Bienes comunes y ciudadanía. Ciudad de México: Ediciones Böll.
[6] Cañigueral, A. (2014). Vivir mejor con menos. Barcelona: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial.
[7] Gehl, J. op.cit.
[8] Cañigueral, A. op.cit.
[9] Fundación Heinrich Böll, op.cit.
[10] Gehl, J. op.cit.
[11] Muxí, Z., Montaner, J.M. (2011). Arquitectura y política. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili.
[12] Lucas, M.A. op. cit.
[13] https://agora.picapp.org
by Elena De Nictolis | Sep 17, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
The Italian scene of activism for the commons increasingly often sees local communities getting organized and starting real estate negotiations with public or private owners to transfer the property of important pieces of real estate in communities’ hands. A recent post on this blog presented the case of the Innesto Community Coop in Val Cavallina, Lombardia. The community coop launched a crowdfunding campaign to buy back from a public authority “La Casa del Pescatore”. This is considered a critical facility for the local community for this is the place where many community activities take place. At the same time this facility is the means through which the micro-economic activities that guarantee the economic sustainability and therefore the social impact produced by the community coop are run.
There at least two similar experiences in Italy. They are carried out in Rome by the Co-Roma project and in Milan by Macao. There might be more cases and we would be happy to discuss this kind of commons-based real estate transactions on our blog more and more if our readers know of similar cases. We have seen this happening also abroad in difficult contexts like in New York City with the REIC and in Germany with the Mietzhauser Sindakat.
We will focus here on a brief description of the Macao experience in Milano. We will then suggest this approach could be a possible strategy for contexts that are facing similar issues in Bologna, where the Làbas collective was recently evicted by the police from an abandoned former barracks and in Mondeggi, Tuscany where the Mondeggi as a Commons initiative gathers a diverse network of organic producers, farmers, professors, architects, students and active citizens who want to oppose the selling out of public heritage in favor of private investors, and propose to the City as an alternative to privatization the civic use of the whole property.
The Macao experience
The Macao experience was initiated by a group of artists and creative workers, part of the “Lavoratori dell’arte”, Art Workers movement in 2012. Macao blossomed under the Mayorship of Giuliano Pisapia and the large coalition of left wing parties that he led, that succeeded at the local elections in Milan after decades of right-wing coalitions governing the City. The Macao experience initiated with the occupation of an abandoned skyscraper in the center of Milan, the “Torre Galfa”. The group of activists, artists and creative workers were evicted some days after the occupation, but a few weeks later they managed to occupy and move into a former slaughterhouse, in Via Molise 12, were they are still based. In the initial phase of the path, thousands of people participated to the Macao activity. After the first months of activity, the participation considerably shrank to 120 people in late 2012. The building that Macao is currently occupying is publicly owned, and located in a semi-peripheral area of the city. The occupation is therefore illegal, but the City undertook a strategy based on tolerance and informality. In the early summer of 2014, the City of Milan set up a negotiation board to deal with City-owned abandoned spaces with a potentiality for social innovation purpose[1]. The aim of the negotiation board was to find ways to include even informal associations or autonomous organizations or collectives. Macao accepted to participate to the negotiation. However the dialogue did not produce substantial results. The intense dialogue with the City produced a draft of City Resolution, that takes inspiration from the Bologna Regulation on the Urban Commons with significant adaptation. The Resolution was not approved by the City Government in charge.
Picture from Zero: https://goo.gl/DLd4MC.
The building where Macao is currently based is formally owned by a publicly owned company, Sogemi S.P.A., and is part of a larger complex called Ortomercato. Sogemi board decided to sell the buildings contained in the area including Macao’s headquarter. Macao therefore decided to implement a proactive strategy and proceed with the acquisition of the building, following the successful model of collective property adopted by the Mietzhauser Sindakat, a German reality. After manifesting their interest to buy the property to the City of Milan, who declared that they must proceed with a public contest, Macao launched a fundraising campaign for the acquisition of the building and constituted an open association, composed by individuals and other NGOs that want to contribute to Macao’s activities. The bylaws of the association is available here.
The Mondeggi and Labàs cases
Could the experiences that we just described be a role model for other cases like Làbas and Mondeggi?
Picture from Fuori Binario: https://goo.gl/Q5M8Rw.
The Mondeggi Initiative was recently analysed on our blog. The Mondeggi Bene Comune initiative was born in 2013, out of the Florence Committee for Land as a Common Good (Terra bene Comune Firenze), with the support of Genuino Clandestino, in order to defend the principles of commoning on agricultural lands on the specific site of the Mondeggi farm, a 200 hectares territory situated in the Florence metropolitan region and owned by the Florence Province, who wanted to sell the farm because of a huge dept. a group of around 100 people immediately opposed to the sell the property and proposed biological agricultural projects in the farm. One year after the first manifestation of interest, in 2014, this community decided to occupy one of the colonic houses of the farm. Currently, 20 people are living in the farm and collectively manage it. Recently, the Committee issued a Declaration of Civic Use and proposed to the public actor to manage the whole Mondeggi Farm also launching a petition addressing public intellectuals and academics for supporting this initiative.
In the City of Bologna, the eviction of the Làbas collective from the former Caserma Masini, is stimulating a strong debate on active resistance and occupation of public buildings for social use. Làbas is the political collective that on November 13, 2012, occupied an abandoned military station of 9.000 squared meters, the former Caserma Masini on Orfeo Street n. 46, currently owned by the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (the Italian Soveriegn Wealth Fund, hereinafter CdP). Since the occupation, Làbas regenerated the space and organized a wide set of activities, open to the neighbourhood and the whole city, ranging from political activity such as the campaign #iooccupo, #I occupy, a protest against housing policies of the City of Bologna, that also practice concrete fight against evictions and support realities that promote access to housing for vulnerable groups, also through illegal occupations such as the “Via Solferino 42”, occupation of a building owned by the a Blind Institute, the Istituto Cavazza, that allows 20 families to access housing. Another core issue of Làbas is the migration crisis, that they address through communication activities and volunteering actions, social urban gardening and social economic activities.
Picture from Il resto del Carlino: https://goo.gl/eHAupH.
The Làbas collective recently started a dialogue with the City Government about the future of the space and established a “Comitato per la Tutela e l’Affermazione del’’ex Caserma Masini Bene Comune”, a Committee for the Care and Affirmation of the former Caserma Masini as a commons, that provides them with a legally recognised infrastructure with currently 700 members. In early August, the Làbas center was evicted and received manifestation of support from a wide array of social actors in the City. What is required for the civic and institutional actors involved in this situation for addressing it is to carry out an exercise of civic imagination, as stated by Matteo Lepore (deputy-mayor for economic development, the commons and civic imagination) that recently proposed for Làbas and other realities active in the neighbourhood to open a dialogue on the possibility to contribute to the regeneration and temporary reuse of the wide abandoned Staveco area, a former military area which is going to be destined for 85% of its space to social use. Also, declarations from the Mayor of Bologna Virginio Merola are open to the dialogue to find an alternative solution for Làbas. On September 9th hundreds of city inhabitants walked the streets of the city center in a peaceful parade aimed to ask the reopening of Làbas and its activities. The peaceful attitude of the participants contrasts the sudden and violent eviction of early August, showing the willingness to restore the pre-existing collaborative atmosphere with public authorities, that was abruptly and wrongly breached, also according to Lepore’ opinion.
Buying back the commons
Is an alternative solution, meaning another building in another place, just good enough for real commons?
Commons is about the social process of commoning as many thought leaders and scholars say. And some of these collectives are not just simple collectives, but a manifestation of what we could call potential “commons enterprises”. Some progressive cities like Bologna are adopting an approach to this kind of experiences that is definitely advanced compared to the average of Italian Cities. As a matter of fact, the institutional strategy to address illegal occupations so far has been two-folded: regularizations where the City Government was led by radical left wing or radical social right wing coalitions and evictions where the City Government was led by liberal, pro-market centre-right and sometimes also centre-left coalitions. Some cities like Bologna have chosen a third path, based on the recognition of the social value produced by those experiences and on a public-commons bargaining process, whereby such collectives in exchange for leaving an occupied space, the social reality involved would have been allowed to find an appropriate arrangement with the support of the City Government. However, even this third far-sighted approach still relies on a role of the local government as an intermediary and not as a platform or enabling actor[2]. Also, the local government exposes itself to the critique that in this way it incentivizes a sort of real estate market of occupations. Last, the political meaning of the urban commons initiative gets lost, generating a loss of social and cultural value produced meanwhile in that specific building not elsewhere.
If the commons want to succeed they need to fight with instruments similar to those that other economic actors use. So, a fourth path, definitely more challenging for both the city government, as well as Labàs and similar commons entrepreneurs, could be to enable them to buy the building. This is a strategy Iaione suggested in 2011. This option is already contemplated somehow by the Bologna Regulation on Civic Collaboration for the Urban Commons, but newer and more refined financing and regulatory tools have been developed meanwhile. Using these newer tools some experimentations on commons-based finance such as the Co-Roma experimentation, the case of Macao in Milan and “l’Innesto” Community Cooperative are carried out.
This strategy seems to be applicable, through a public-private-commons partnership, even to larger infrastructure like the Port of Capri which is facing far bigger risks and a more complex regulatory framework. The Masini Barracks – which according to a formal estimate is valued 12 million Euros on paper – is worth way less then its formal prices in the current market conditions and therefore it seems to be the perfect test bed for a commons-based financing operation. Maybe if the community was provided with the right expertise, it could definitely negotiate on an equal footing and further lower the cost of the deal to get it closer to a threshold that the community can reasonably afford[3].
Concluding remarks
Civic imagination might therefore be conceived not as a new episode of participatory democracy, but rather as that process through which social actors, individually and collectively, are enabled to challenge the ordinary bureaucratic rationality[4] and envision “better political, social, and civic environments and work towards achieving those futures”[5]. Also imagination is civic when it is concerned with society and not, for Instance, with individual aspiration. Civic Imagination should therefore be about transforming utopias, micro-actions, ideas, projects of collectives and active citizens into real “commons enterprises” and “collective institutions” to achieve a real “economic democracy”[6].
The role of the public sphere (bureaucracy and politics) in this game should change. Primarily, it should avoid any extreme repressive attitudes, understanding the added value coming from such initiatives. As Matteo Lepore recently stated: “while somebody has been busy for a long time placing traps along the way, thinking only in terms of formal rules and formal legality, everyone willing to walk towards the goal of a new policy on these issues have already taken a step forward down this path. We would no longer have this kind of problems, if we were able to turn city inhabitants needs into participatory paths and urban assets into opportunities open to everyone, in a city where there are still many abandoned spaces to be recovered and a third sector already very active and widespread. Over the next few weeks, through the Civic Imagination Office, we will move along this path”.
Both civic and public actors have to change their attitude, adapting their role in order to find appropriate solutions, even through experimental initiatives.
City inhabitants must start thinking in a more entrepreneurial way. They actually have the duty to be entrepreneurial in order to adopt the most appropriate means to safeguard the commons from some backward-looking bureaucracies. Thus, there is also a liability towards future generations, which shall not be considered just as an ethical principle. It can be configured as a constitutional principle in Italy, pursuant to articles 2, 9, 67 e 98[7]. In this regard, the civic buy back of the commons could be a solution perfectly aligned with the new proactive role citizens have to play and successfully achieved in many countries, like in India or The Netherlands, aimed at the protection of the environment as well as other common assets. It is not new even for the Italian scene. Many civil society organizations like WWF, Italia Nostra, FAI, Legambiente, Libera have initiated similar projects investing in the regeneration and/or acquisition or management of common assets at risk. In this perspective, as the Macao collective has announced, it could be adopted the model created by the Mietshäuser Syndikat, a cooperative which manages the collective purchase of occupied properties. It practices the path of private law as a suitable tool for the buy back of the commons, so that the property is taken away from the logic of profit and commercial speculation.
Public authorities should also start upgrading their approach. They need to give up on their role as an intermediary and start acting as an institutional platform enabling civic imagination[8]. For instance Làbas as much as any other informal community does not want to incorporate a legal entity. Policymakers could therefore enable the establishment of a special purpose vehicle, a so-called “Friends of Làbas”, that would act as a trustee, a shepard, a custodian working for and with the Làbas informal community on a solid and credible project for potential investors (in technical terms articulating the project pipeline) that would embed Làbas values and goals in the proposal to the current owners, raise funds for the acquisition, negotiate the terms of the acquisition from the national publicly-owned company that owns the asset, grant rights of perpetual use to the Làbas informal community. The bylaws of such legal entity should provide the destination to use by the Làbas informal community of the building and grant/secure the right to use to Làbas in perpetuity. This would be a great project on which the Civic Imagination Office should work on.
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Il panorama italiano dell’attivismo per i beni comuni vede in misura crescente esperienze di comunità locali che si auto-organizzano e avviano negoziazioni immobiliari con i proprietari, pubblici o privati, degli immobili per trasferirne la proprietà nelle mani della comunità. Un recente post su questo blog ha presentato il caso della Cooperativa di Comunità Innesto in Val Cavallina, Lombardia, la quale ha lanciato una campagna di crowdfunding per acquistare dal proprietario pubblico “La Casa del Pescatore”. Possiamo osservare altre due esperienze similari nel panorama italiano: a Roma, con il progetto Co-Roma e l’attività della Comunità per il Parco Pubblico di Centocelle e a Milano, con il caso di Macao. Ci sarebbero molte altre esperienze con cui confrontare questi casi, anche a livello internazionale per esempio a New York City con il REIC e in Germania con il Mietzhauser Sindakat. L’articolo si soffermerà, dopo una riflessione introduttiva su approfondimento di questi casi, in particolare l’esperienza di Macao, connettendoli con la recente vicenda del collettivo Làbas (Bologna), e il caso di Mondeggi (Toscana, Provincia di Firenze), che presentano tratti comuni seppur con rilevanti differenze.
[1] M. D’Ovidio, & A. Cossu, Culture is reclaiming the creative city: The case of Macao in Milan, Italy, in City, Culture and Society, 2016, Vol. 1, n. 6, (doi: 10.1016/j.ccs.2016.04.001)
[2] C. Iaione, The Platform State, available here: www.commoning.city.
[3] Sheila R. Foster, Urban Informality as a Commons Dilemma, 40 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 261 (2009).
[4] D. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, Melville House (2016).
[5]G. Baiocchi et al., Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life, Routledge (2014).
[6] Tom Malleson, After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century, Oxford University Press, (2014).
[7] R. Bifulco, Diritti e generazioni future. Problemi giuridici della responsabilità intergenerazionale, Milan (2013).
[8] Baiocchi et al., Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life, Routledge (2014).
by Cristiano Gatti | Jun 16, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
In today’s connected world, access to the internet should be an essential service, like water or electricity. And just like water and electricity, it should be available to everyone, regardless of circumstance.
Building entirely new networks, cities, supported by internet service providers and mobile carriers is good but it would be better if you are able to leverage already existing networks, like all the private residential Wi-Fi networks that are already spread throughout the city. Imagine turning every home currently connected to the internet into a mini Wi-Fi hotspot serving the public, so that anytime a subscriber walked past a participating home network their phones would automatically connect to that Wi-Fi network, thereby lessening their own data charges and significantly reducing the strain on mobile carrier networks. All this is made possible by home subscribers giving up a small, likely unused, percentage of their Wi-Fi to make it available for public use.
This kind of initiative started a couple of years ago in Spain, where Martin Varsavsky founded a company (Fon) with the mission of blanketing the world with Wi-Fi. Now Fon is an international company, supported by some of the world’s most important telcos (Google, Microsoft, British Telecom and Deutsche Telekom and Qualcomm) and in 2014 it broke the barrier with 14 million Fon hotspots.
This project is very important because it aims to help people overcome the barriers they might face when using technology, giving access to the internet to hundreds of people who currently can’t get online. That means you can check and send emails, use your social network, watch videos and browse the web, all without spending money.
Luckily, all over the world there are a lot of Wi-Fi communities that have a common, simple and fast operation. First of all, it is necessary to join the community and there are two ways to go: either you are a customer of the company that provides broadband services (in this case, by agreeing to get free and unlimited access to other consumers’ hotspots) or you have to buy pre-paid vouchers or subscriptions to be part of the Wi-Fi community. Secondly, you must download the dedicated app for smartphones and tablets where entering your username and password. Once installed, the app will use your location to show a list of nearby free hotspots that can be in bars, hotels, shops, schools, hospitals, banks but also in private homes. Finally, when you choose your favorite hotspot, you are connected and you can surf the net.
In addition to this, as Alison Powell pointed out in 2011, Wi-Fi communities could have a positive outcome on civic culture because it is clear that these projects are able to “motivate volunteers to participate in building technology and working towards shared social goals. They also hold the potential to shift the provision of communications access away from corporate and towards more public interest models”.
The World Bank estimates that for every 10% penetration of internet access, a country’s GDP grows by 1,28%, so it is useful to work with local, provincial and national government to provide Wi-Fi in communities for the purpose of education, economic development and social inclusion, enabling access to the internet as a catalyst for change. Community Wi-Fi holds a lot of potential for enabling a functional connected future, where the barriers between private and public Wi-Fi blur to the extent that both humans and machines are able to be constantly and reliably connected. The key to ensuring that the connected city, and indeed the connected world works, is to make sure that just as the traffic on our streets is regulated, so too is the data traffic in our air.
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Il futuro della diffusione della “connettività per tutti” non risiede solo negli investimenti infrastrutturali delle grandi compagnie del settore tech ma anche nella condivisione della connessione privata dei vari utenti. Le Wi-Fi Community, in modo spontaneo, stanno riuscendo sempre di più a fornire l’accesso ad Internet a milioni di persone in tutto il mondo che altrimenti non ne avrebbero la possibilità
by Francesca Spigarolo | Apr 4, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
A semiotic reading of the business incubation world, towards a model of collaborative incubation between small ecosystems.
This article originally appeared in Italian on Doppiozero.
Since a few years something interesting has been observed around the word “incubation”. Metaphorology scholars define it as “catachresis”. As happens (happened) to the Italian locution “la gamba del tavolo” (the table leg), we are dealing with a phenomenon where a metaphor settles itself in our language, moving from being a “tropo” to real language, so passing from being a rhetoric figure to an independent item included in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. The expression does not need any more to make different worlds communicate with each other (which is the main aim of the metaphors). In our days no one while saying “table leg” has the impression of being using a metaphor. In the same way, (almost) no one, speaking about “incubation”, really means to link the neonatology world to the start-up devices.
The word “incubation” has the power to create narrations so visionary and so relevant, but today it is living a saturation phase. There is enough space for a new way of business incubation, which could refill the hole created by lack of sense and activity in the world of support to the companies and that could go even further, opening new generations of modelling metaphors.
What is an incubator? According to the European Commission, during the 90’, was considered “incubator” a space where to concentrate services and support for the start-ups. Lately, at the beginning of the next decade, this definition already underwent a transformation. An incubator is not a space anymore but an organization, an activating subject, an accellerator, who provides services between which an incubation-space, services for supporting the business idea, network creations and opportunities. The definition even tells us that realizing a typology of incubators is possible with a preventive check of some broad variables: rules of employment and admission, functions and services, intensity of the supporting action. In the same report also appears a diagram that tries to make a topologic (in addition to a typologic) representation of the incubators:
The two dimensions on which the map is constructed are the technological level and the management assistance. It means that the main features of the incubation, underlined by this source, are the financial support and the type of activity generated by the helped start up/s.
An important role is still played by the physical dimension of the “incubator” as a place, be it a park or a centre. In the following years, this word turned into an umbrella-term: it detached itself from the single activity to embrace a broader range of experiences, going from education to services providing, assistance, sponsor searching.
Back to the narrative sphere, “incubator” has an interesting oscillation of meaning, never taken afloat. Differently from what happens in the Italian language, where the word incubator is used both with a male and a female meaning, in the English one, the female acceptation doesn’t exist, making the word far from its bond with a maternal meaning.
The smart marketing is made of leading narrations: abstracts stories that deals with a complex system of values. An example of leading narration is the myth, which at the same time is general and peculiar. The myth, as all leading narrations, is so effective as it activates those values that represent the basis of a society. Myths are simplifications full of meaning. The narration that has been dominating during these years of fast development in the business support area is based on a kind of familiar relationship, as the one between father or mother and son, whose main feature is the support. In the paternal case, chronologically preceeding the second one, the support came out through the perspective of an economic remuneration; in the maternal one instead, through the physical take caring by giving spaces and other assets for the business development. It is as if we were saying (in this dominant and simplifying narrative) that the father gives a pocket money every month, while the mother takes care of the son. Both the parents make their sons depend on them for heir survival, in a kind of relationship one-to-one. As we can see, in the semiotic square standing downward (like a figurative Cartesian Diagram), in the upper axis are settled the two ruling logics, while in the lower one we find the logics of formation (quite totally paternal) and acceleration (quite totally maternal).
When we put in the diagram all the traditional incubation experiences, expression of the tension generated by these two values, we notice that there are more crowded sections contrasted by sections which are almost empty, and which could therefore be available for new players entering the market.
In all the experiences present in the diagram we observe the activation of a hierarchical relationship between the incubator and the incubated subject. Horizontal links are missing. In the open-innovation world, but generally in the collaboration sphere too, a more “collaborative” kind of narration can be discovered. In order to realize it we need a new leading narration, not based on parenting relationships anymore. In the main narration of traditional incubation, in fact, the collaborative logic brings to a negative competition (as between brothers). What we really need is a different logic, similar to the one that we have found studying the scientific communities, where collaborative platforms are already used in order to realize open innovation (in research), but ,moreover, that we have found during two years of considerations (shared between Kilowatt and Social Lab) developed thanks to the CoopUp Bologna experience.
In our experience (CoopUp Bologna as first experiment of community business incubation, ie. incubation ecosystem – our tribe) we noticed a different logic: more “tribal”, based on the construction of a practice and knowledge community, of a collaborative network, of tools for value distribution and creation, of opportunities for exchange, relationship and comparison, in a common growth perspective. To this, we want to dedicate the proposal of collaborative incubation, dedicated not to a single start-up but to ecosystems of new enterprises that are growing together (even together with already existing and structured companies). This proposal might not be suitable for all new businesses. Our experience is addressed in particular to the so-called cohesive companies, as defined by Domenico Sturabotti and Paolo Venturi, and in general to the startups with a “social vocation”, attentive to their impact and consequently not always feeling comfortable with a form of support that promotes a development model very different from that for which they – the new enterprises – have decided, in the first instance, to start a business.
It is possible and perhaps necessary to move from the familiar logic towards a collaborative logic: from the concept of family – dependence, to that tribe, where there is not a parent, but a chieftain – or a shaman – coordinating all (the community, the chain , etc.) and needing everyone to be independent but collaborative (and conscious), so that the whole community functions. The chieftain has to win the confidence of the community, which the parent is not required to do.
We must try to explore a new incubation narrative, starting from a new ecosystem model based on relationships, trust and community. We have grown too used (we catacresizzati) to import without reflecting models from outside, “in the periphery of the empire”, as it was common to say few decades ago. The economic and especially financial magnetism of the Silicon Valley has become a cultural values and entrepreneurial magnetism. Everyone’s commitment should be to recover a European and cooperative approach to the company support. It is specially for this reason that the tribe seems to us a narration which is worth exploring.
The ecosystem incubation square takes to hart the experiences developed in the last year in the open innovation field. It “contains” the traditional incubation square in the top-left corner, it displays open innovation in the bottom-left corner, the research and development and peer to peer experiences in the bottom-right corner and also leaves open an almost plain space in top-right corner. To say it differently: it is coming to maturity.
In the square of community incubation, in the collaborative and mutualistic ecosystem support, there is need of new figures. The first is a tribal chief, who brings into the system “soft” and interpersonal skills and tools of community organizing. He is in some ways shamanic: his relationships are based on a trust channel, he must be able to read the “health” of an entire community, he needs to know how to manage community-driven dynamics. He is able to go beyond the single sector and above all he knows how to manage in a participatory way the community engagement dynamics. Finally, he knows how not to create dependence on its presence.
But there is not only the head of the tribe, the shaman who knows how to have a systemic vision, the community ecosystem managers. There are also the “community leaders”, situational leaders that activate according to their own talents and skills: those who depending on the specific objective can activate and strengthen the accountability of the entire ecosystem. In open innovation there can be large organizations who work as flying start, which signal a need for innovation that can then activate different collective growth experiences. But also, communities and informal groups, pushed by intense motivation, competence, talent.
The tribe operates as a system in which cooperation prevails over competition. The tribal chief maintains the vision and is able to measure out the roles of the community participants. In the semiotic square of collaborative incubation it is important to firstly populate the team of interlocutors who accept the challenge to co-manage their role as community leaders. We are in an almost-smooth space, more rhizomic that hierarchical, where wit is more important to know how to manage relationships than how to defend positions. “In the smooth […] the points are subordinated to the journey”, was said in Mille plateaux of Deleuze and Guattari. A common journey.
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In questo articolo, originariamente pubblicato su Doppiozero, Gaspare Caliri propone una lettura semiotica del mondo dell’incubazione d’impresa e ripercorre la storia del termine “incubazione”, nato come una metafora ed ormai entrato nei nostri dizionari.
“È necessario provare a esplorare una nuova narrazione dell’incubazione, partendo da un nuovo modello di ecosistema basato sulla relazione, sulla fiducia e sulla comunità”
