by Marina Bassi | Mar 31, 2016 | The Urban Media Lab
Next April, the 1st, will begin in Barcelona the European Meeting organised by The Global Platform for the Right to the City (GPR2C). The Global Platform for the Right to the City (GPR2C) was set in November 2014 aiming to advocate for fair, democratic, sustainable and inclusive cities. An informal network gathers hundreds of organizations from American, African, Asian and European countries representing social movements, non-governmental organizations, networks and forums, academic institutions, local governments, foundations and international organizations.
The meeting aims to present the initiative of the Global Platform and its principles, goals and actions; strengthening regional alliances and inviting new organizations to join it; discuss the meaning of the Right to the City among our organizations and share information and analyse setbacks, challenges and/or particular regional developments.
Since Professor Iaione and LabGov are GPR2C’s partners, they will attend the Thematic Meeting.
More info on: http://www.righttothecityplatform.org.br/
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Il prossimo aprile, il 1 °, inizierà a Barcellona il Meeting europeo organizzato da GPR2C. L’incontro ha lo scopo di presentare l’iniziativa della piattaforma globale e dei suoi principi, gli obiettivi e le azioni; rafforzare le alleanze regionali e invitando nuove organizzazioni a farne parte; discutere il significato del diritto alla città tra le nostre organizzazioni e condividere le informazioni e analizzare battute d’arresto, le sfide e gli sviluppi regionali. Dal momento che il professor Iaione e LabGov sono partner di GPR2C, parteciperanno alla riunione tematica.
by Marina Bassi | Oct 6, 2015 | The Urban Media Lab
THE 2015 EDITION OF THE EVENT Il Salone della CSR e dell’innovazione sociale WILL TAKE PLACE FROM TODAY – THE 6th TO THE 7th OF OCTOBER.
The event, organized in collaboration with Bocconi University, Unioncamere, and Alleanza Cooperative Italiane, will be held in Milan, in via Roentgen 1 (University of Bocconi). Professor Iaione, coordinator of LabGov, will attend the Exhibition and participate in a panel about Collective impact: collective intelligence as a tool for development.
The Fair has been confirmed as the most important event in Italy centered around corporate responsibility and social innovation. It is not only a meeting place for organizations’ leaders but also a time to bring together an attentive audience, that is interested in understanding the future of sustainability.Passion is the engine that leads companies to choose sustainability. It helps young people move towards training programs that focus on the values of Corporate Social Responsibility, and pushes the consumer to reward organizations more accountable. Inspiration is an important factor because there can be no innovation or change without attention to values, and no cross-pollination between different worlds and spheres without excellent examples to refer to.
Three words characterize the edition 2015: sciences, openness, and sharing.
Sciences because, as always, the quality of content and the debate will be high and the Exhibition will combine theory and practice.
Opening because the trade fair helps to spread the principles and values of CSR and to involve people who are not yet engaged with these issues.
Sharing because, in a rapidly changing society, it is increasingly necessary to network in all senses.
Here is the program of the event: Program – Salone CSR
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IL SALONE DELLA CSR E DELLA INNOVAZIONE SOCIALE
Il 6 e il 7 ottobre avrà luogo a Milano, in via Roentgen 1 – Università Bocconi – la nuova Edizione del Salone della CSR e della Innovazione Sociale. All’evento, organizzato in collaborazione con l’Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Unioncamere e Alleanza Cooperative Italiane, parteciperà il Professor Fernando Christian Iaione, coordinatore di LabGov , nel Panel Collective impact: intelligenza collettiva al servizio del cambiamento.
by Marina Bassi | Oct 5, 2015 | The Urban Media Lab
FROM 9th TO 10th OCTOBER, THE EVENT “LE GIORNATE DI BERTINORO PER L’ECONOMIA CIVILE” WILL BE HELD IN BERTINORO, IN THE CEUB – VIA FRANGIPANE, 6.
Every year, in early October, on the hill of Bertinoro, the protagonists of the academic world, the Social Economy and Volunteers, and institutions meet with a community of students and young social entrepreneurs, to think and talk about the issues of Civil Economy. Since fifteen years, Le Giornate di Bertinoro have represented a laboratory for the analysis and the comparison of future challenges of the third sector with the aim of developing a paradigm of Development and Sociability.
The meeting has been promoted by AICCON. It is the Research Center sponsored by the University of Bologna, the cooperative movement and by many public and private organizations, operating in the Social Economy. The Association aims to encourage, support and organize activities to promote the culture of solidarity, with a focus on ideals, attitudes and activities of Cooperatives and Non Profit Organizations.
The Economics of Cohesion will be the focus of this year. It will shine the spotlight and spark a debate on new production of social value, the governance of the Commons, the Social Impact Assessment and on the long-awaited reform of the Third Sector. Plenary sessions and round tables will alternate in a well-established format during this year edition of the #GdBLab – Giornate di Bertinoro Laboratory. Professor Iaione – coordinator of LabGov – will attend the event, addressing the issue of the #Commons. LabGov is dealing with this issue, especially in expectation of the 1st IASC Conference on urban commons.
Today, tissue regeneration and social levels of social cohesion of communities also pass through the economy (economic cohesion) and the identification of new mechanisms of production value. Cohesion becomes, therefore, a fundamental element for the competitiveness of the territories and, consequently, for the local business fabric. To rebuild the bonds of trust, a fundamental element for the proper functioning of economic and social institutions, it is necessary to restart from the repositioning of the economic discourse on the Commons (environment, water, land, knowledge, biodiversity, culture and identity), because their characteristics require a mode of management that is based on sharing practices. In particular, based on the sharing economy, the cooperative represents the role model, because it is able to guarantee inclusive governance structures that organize the offer and, at the same time, pay attention to the demand side, intercepting the needs of the communities in which those goods are placed.
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L’Economia della Coesione – Le Giornate di Bertinoro per l’Economia Civile
Anche quest’anno, i prossimi 9-10 Ottobre, avrà luogo a Bertinoro l’evento Le Giornate di Bertinoro per l’Economia Civile, nel CEUB – Centro Universitario Residenziale Bertinoro, in Via Frangipane 6. L’Economia della Coesione sarà il tema centrale che quest’anno accenderà i riflettori e il dibattito sui nuovi meccanismi di produzione del valore sociale, sulla governance dei Beni Comuni, sulla Valutazione dell’impatto sociale e sulla tanto attesa Riforma del Terzo settore.
by Marina Bassi | Aug 9, 2015 | The Urban Media Lab
The “Open Collaboration Pact between the Municipality of Bologna and Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna” has been agreed! The pact aimes at re-conceiving urban spaces as a common resource for communities. . The Open collaboration pact is the first step in the process (towards) CO-Bologna, the public policy launched by the city during the Civic collaboration fest in may 2015, during the celebration for the first year since the approval of the“Regulation on the collaboration among citizens and administration for the care and regeneration of urban commons”. All those efforts aims at installing collaboration as a structural methodology to run the city as a collaborative commons.
Bologna, the first city in Italy to conduct collaborative governance experimentation, will host the 1st IASC Conference, named “The City as a Commons: Reconceiving Urban Space, Common Goods And City Governance” is coming! The conference is organized by LabGov in collaboration with Fordham University of New York and ICEDD, the International center for democracy and democratization.The Conference will be held in Bologna, on November 6-7 2015. The conference will be co-chaired by Professor Christian Iaione (UniMarconi University and LUISS Guido Carli) and Professor Sheila Foster (Fordham University).
In the track “Designing and governing the city as a commons” all issues about institutional design for urban commons will be faced, and scholars and practicioners will discuss, asking questions and comparing possible solutions. Are there specific model to run the city as a commons? The decline of public financing and cyclical real estate and fiscal crises, result of the Leviathan-state governance model, have forced cities to struggle to prevent urban shrinking or gentrification processes, as well as to support and maintain shared resources and common goods or regulate urban development to keep cities as a fair, just, diverse, human flourishing and creative environment. Out of the public-private management dichotomy, are there other models to design or re-design urban settlements and other governance solutions to manage cities themselves as not just market-friendly, but also as human-friendly urban collaborative commons?
The deadline is approaching, still two days to register as an auditor or submit your paper on: http://www.labgov.it/wordpress/urbancommons/design-and-governing/
by Marina Bassi | Aug 9, 2015 | The Urban Media Lab
The 1st IASC (International Association for the Study of the Commons) Thematic Conference on urban commons is approaching. The call for abstracts is out until Aug 10th at 12:00 AM PT. The Conference title unveils the complexity and the ambition of an event that wishes to gather for two days the most prominent scholars and practitioners on urban commons, social innovation, sharing economy, to talk about “The City as a Commons: Reconceiving Urban Space, Common Goods And City Governance”. The Conference is organized by LabGov – LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons, a partnership between the Urban Law Center of Fordham University and the International Center on Democracy and Democratization (ICEDD) of the LUISS University of Rome (http://www.labgov.it/the-city-as-a-commons-the-first-international-conference-on-urban-commons/). It will take place in Bologna on November 6-7, 2015. One of the track of the Conference concerns the Democratic Innovation and how governance of the urban commons could influence it. This is why we decided to interview one of the most prominent international scholars on democratic theory, Professor Nadia Urbinati.
On July the 5th, the Greek citizens went to the polls for the referendum announced by their Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras. Greek people were asked to reply to a hard question, which then raised countless debates and opinions starting from the decision whether accept, or not, the austerity policies and economic measures proposed by the European Union and international creditors, to solve the issues about the Greek debt.
Many scholars, professors, writers and academics put the stress on the important fact that Greece is the cradle of democracy, the country where were born the most important historical thinkers of democracy.
Nadia Urbinati is one of those we are referring to. She is “Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies” at the Department of Political Science of the Columbia University, she is also a political theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. She co-chaired the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Political and Social Thought and founded and chaired the Workshop on Politics, Religion and Human Rights.
The day before the Greek referendum, the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica” published an interesting article written by professor Urbinati. The title of the article is Greece and the European democracy myth which briefly but effectively analyses the history of democracy and the development of the political thought around this myth.
Some LabGov editors seized the opportunity and had the chance to build up a dialogue with professor Nadia Urbinati, trying to investigate the intersections between LabGov projects and the academic thought of professor Urbinati:
1) The twenty-first century seems to be identified as “urban century”. Can you create a model of urban democracy in Greece, in Italy, in Europe, or in the world? What features should you get?
Aristotle writes in the collection of the Greek constitutions that there are urban democracies and countryside democracies. However, a good democracy is mostly urban. Democracy, historically speaking, had its roots and developed in urban areas. Cooperation among people is essential to achieve it, regular exchanges are needed. These features are all better achieved in a urban environment. It is even possible to say, that democracy is the best form of an urban policy.
In ancient Greece or during the American or French revolution, participation was limited and fluctuant. Ephialte and Pericles created daily indemnities to allow people to participate. Today the situation is completely different, and there is the co-existence of two apparently opposite trends: on the one hand, physicality is no longer necessary in order to share in power, (the social media allow us to participate without “being there”); but on the other hand, politics lost credibility and attraction at least at the national level. Yet we witness the rise to a re-discover of “locality” and as we know democracy lives in small spaces better than in large ones, closer to us better than far from us.
2) The twenty-first century seems to have also another feature, a prefix. The one of the Latin “cum” or the Anglo-Saxon “CO-“. There are many debate on co-operation, co-working, co-design of the commons (i.e. “beni comuni”), the regained centrality of the community, the importance of communication, the knowledge economy, etc. In Bologna, Mantua, Battipaglia, Palermo, Rome – as well as in other Italian and foreign cities – are emerging examples underlining the need for the community to get involved in public life through public actions and in daily collaboration of citizens. For example, in Battipaglia there is a process of collaborative planning, which puts around the same table to co-design services: citizens, institutions, businesses, civil society organizations, schools and universities. The main goal is to propose a new approach to the city’s development through a fostered channel of both citizens and institutions. In Bologna, we recently celebrated the first year of the Regulation on the collaboration between citizens and Public Administration for the care and regeneration of urban commons (i.e. “Regolamento sulla collaborazione per la cura e rigenerazione dei beni comuni urbani“). In Mantua, it has been built a platform of collaborative governance for a development centered on local culture and knowledge. What kind of role can these experiments have in the broader process of rethinking the local democracy? Could – a model of this kind – be the right approach to give Mediterranean countries back the role of “cradle of democracy”?
The founding fathers had this intuition. Altiero Spinelli thought of the unification starting from the local not only the national. Subsidiarity tells us that what can be solved at the local level, should not be solved at the national level. Take the issue of immigration, which is wrongly always thought as a national problem. However, it is in each municipality that lies the seeds of a possible solution: we should involve marginalized people; there are many things they can do, and many sector in which they can play a big role as participant. But in order to do so, a strong local community is needed.
3) Greece, and even more its citizens need to work in order to reactivate their economy: how can an investment in democratic innovations turn into a positive economic investment for the welfare of the local community?
Let’s think of the referendum recently held in Greece; it did not turn out to be what many believed it ought to, but at least it was a strong statement by the Greek people. Most of us had no idea of the meaning of public debt (who owns what to whom?). We need a stronger Europe, with less bias by Norther States against Mediterranean States. And above all we would need bright leaders and with strong European belief. In the US, when the State of California when bankrupt, Washington took the lead of a process of economic regeneration — we have to do the same in Europe too. Innovations, even democratic ones, may have a positive impact on our life; and so we would need to invest in our community, and unleash all their potentiality. Cooperation is the only way forward.
4) According to Professor François Garçon, author of Knowing Switzerland, the debt crisis reflected the indifference of the sovereign people. Greece, which has already taken a first step through a referendum, towards a model of direct democracy on economic and financial choices, could now explore new ways to regain possession of their relays and by doing so revive the economy itself, starting from small urban and regional economies. What is your opinion on that?
On an European dimension: we can and we must criticize the actual governance in Europe. The member states have no equal power and have no equivalence among them. There is not a European demos capable of expressing beyond the states. Treaties are no longer enough, especially in a time of economic crisis. The whole European construction was allowed by very lucky circumstances, like economic growth and reconstruction after WW2. Unfortunately, today’s circumstances are dramatically different. We must return to strengthen the local even more than the national if we want to have a political EU. The state should be an enabler of this change, and lately a partner.
5) How would it be possible, for local community inspired by the Rules of Bologna to interact with each other, and so give their contribution in the creation of democratic and horizontal network of local communities? Can they really change democratic and economic premises
It is a matter of education. Legality begins in interpersonal relationships, and cooperation is already a sign of education. American pragmatist thinkers had understood that for the management of a public good coordination was necessary to make everyone fell responsible. We often use the wrong words. For example the word “owner” is improper. We use the word for understanding reasons, but we rarely “own” something; we rather “borrow” or “share”. The key to success is to set good rules so as to make all the people who are involved in some communal enterprise feel they are partners on a equal foot.
Next April, the 1st, will begin in Barcelona the European Meeting organised by The Global Platform for the Right to the City (GPR2C). The Global Platform for the Right to the City (GPR2C) was set in November 2014 aiming to advocate for fair, democratic, sustainable and inclusive cities. An informal network gathers hundreds of organizations from American, African, Asian and European countries representing social movements, non-governmental organizations, networks and forums, academic institutions, local governments, foundations and international organizations.
