Tiber is both a blue and green infrastructure that caǹ contribute to the goals of sustainable development and urban resilience. It represents an opportunity to invest in the redevelopment of urban space, a chance to create new, welcoming and inclusive places, as well as connect the central urban area with areas on the fringes, reconnect the ecological network, develop art projects and cultivate the cultural experience, and improve the well-being of the city and its citizens by creating spaces for events and sports̀ activities.
Situated in the city of Rome, it has become a place of experimentation for the construction of new collaborative governance tools. A synergy with public institutions is intended to commence, an experimentation of applied and empirical research that would lead to the construction of new collaborative forms of management of state property that can also facilitate the action of citizenship and administration.
In order to be able to redevelop the Tiber, it is necessary to adopt an approach inspired by the quintuple helix, that is, to create an eco-system in which public actors, private actors, universities & research institutions, both organized and non-organized civil society can collaborate in order to adopt innovative solutions. This is precisely the approach used by Agenda Tevere, which collaborates with actors representing all the propeller blades.
With this specific goal, Agenda Tevere Onlus was established in 2017 as an accelerator of change, collaboration and shared responsibilitỳ taking. Starting from the reclamation and redevelopment of the riverbanks, Agenda Tevere intends to give back to the river a central role in the life of the city, its center and its suburbs, through an integrated plurality of design solutions that combine different needs and objectives that start from the restoration of degraded areas and a better management of existing activities to the introduction of new and more innovative ones.
Agenda Tevere Onlus has initiated actions in the area to involve the communitỳ and institutions in the process of transformation of the river, with the aim of resolving the conflicts of competencies existing in the urban stretch of the Tiber, through innovative processes and reflections through forms of governance. The strategic goal of the Agenda Tevere is to create “social empowerment” in order to implement projects that serve as examples and give confidence to the individual’s ability to “make a difference.”
Agenda Tevere intends to apply Venture Capital in order to generate “social and civic capital.” Unlike financial capital, “social and civic capital” is not a private or individual asset but rather an asset created specifically for the purpose of being made available and disseminated in the community to which one belongs.
Agenda Tevere, as an association of associations is assisted by various entities to develop and work on multiple competencies. Among these associations is LabGov ETS, LaBoratorio per la GOVernance della città come un bene comune, an empirical/action research/applied research center on the governance of the commons, infrastructure and urban services at LUISS Guido Carli University.
LabGov ETS, as an association, is in charge of writing this governance mechanism foundation, and identifying the right body to coordinate with. Among the various topics that LabGov ETS conducts research on, through an empirical and applied approach, are river and landscape contracts, which in turn fit within the framework of a new paradigm of urbanism, that of collaborative and collaborative urbanism. This new urban planning approach is formulated in the conviction that contemporary urban planning and its regulation no longer offer any answer to the reality of the transformations of the Italian territory and that only a real reversal of the trend can in the future succeed in making urban planning regulations effective, valid and efficient.
The “collaborative paradigm” in urban planning is based on “institutional mending” between the public, private and community sectors to bring together and make public administrations, private businesses and the collaborative city composed of active citizens, voluntary organizations and innovative associations, civic entrepreneurs, responsible and forward-thinking local businesspeople, frontier schools and other knowledge and expertise bearers work in synergy.
The community is no longer a third party to be consulted through participatory tools, but sits at the table together with private individuals and institutions.
LabGov ETS, counting on its many years of experience in applied research, has aimed to assist Agenda Tevere, in an action of experimentation on the territory of the banks of the Tiber along the urban stretch.
In 2017, Agenda Tevere Onlus promoted the start of a shared path towards the Tiber River Contract and led to the signing of a manifesto of intent with seventy signatories, concerning the stretch of the river shaft, starting from the Castel Giubileo dam which crosses the city of Rome and flows until it flows into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the Fiumicino agglomeration, which intends to propose a participatory and effective management of the resources, both expressed and unexpressed, of the stretch of river in question where the banks and waters are in a very poor condition and in need of targeted and timely actions of recovery and redevelopment. The intent was developed in terms of objectives through a program document shared among the institutions.
This shared path initiated in 2017 with great effort and commitment led to the signing, on February 22, 2022, of the negotiated planning agreement for the First Three-Year Action Program of the Tiber River Contract from Castel Giubileo to fice – CdF Tevere.
The River Contract, as defined in Italy by the National Charter of River Contracts, is a voluntary strategic integrated and negotiated planning tool for river territories, which was created with the aim of promoting environmental and landscape redevelopment through actions of prevention, mitigation and monitoring of critical hydrogeological and water quality issues. The priority objective of the River Contract is to achieve the objectives of water body quality (Directive 2000/60) and flood risk prevention and reduction (Directive 2007/60). The River Contract is a pact between the different actors in the area for the sustainable integrated management of a river basin that perceives the river as a living environment and common good.
The contract makes effective the open and collaborative governance model promoted by Tiber Agenda. In fact, it is an enabling tool that allows multiple actors to present shared actions of knowledge oriented to conservationm, biodiversity protection and Tiber promotion.
Another key step in the process that led to the signing of the negotiated planning agreement for the First Three-Year Program of Action dl Contratto di Fiume Tevere da Castel Giubileo alla foce – CdF Tevere was the establishment of the participation foundation Tevere per Tutti by Lazio Regional Law 27/02/2020, n1. The latter, as reflected in Article 20, pursues the following objectives:
a) to incentivize, stimulate and enable public and private stakeholders to invest in the quality and enhancement of the river environment;
b) to carry out actions to stimulate activities co-financed with regional funds and to involve social, civic, cultural, public and sector actors in the enhancement of the river environment, including through maintenance, programming, planning, supervision and coordination initiatives;
c) promote the image of the Tiber through the redevelopment of the urban river stretch, as a tool for the enhancement of cultural, environmental and tourism heritage and the growth of territorial competitiveness.
The foundation is open to all public and private actors who wish to pursue the same goal.
During the process that led to the signing of the River Contract, Agenda Tevere also promoted various projects in the area aimed at stimulating systemic actions. We recall, for example, “Piazza Tevere” and “Tiberis”. These are two projects aimed at making the banks of the Tiber livable and usable. Another project worth mentioning is “Smart Tiber,” an informative and collaborative database and platform to encourage participation and take charge of actions to upgrade the area of the urban banks of the Tiber and reconnect it to the urban fabric of the city.
OpenHeritage: Organizing, Promoting and ENabling HEritage Reuse through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment
OpenHeritage aims at creating sustainable models of heritage asset management. The project puts the idea of inclusive governance of cultural heritage sites together with the development of heritage communities at its center. This means empowering the community in the processes of adaptive reuse.
OpenHeritage works with an open definition of heritage, not limited to listed assets but also involving those buildings, complexes, and spaces that have a symbolic or practical significance for local or trans-local heritage communities.
CO-ROMA JOINS THE FARO CONVENTION NETWORK
In 2018 “Co-Roma”, a coalition of urban actors (local NGOs, local public authorities, Luiss University and the LabGov research and innovation center, community hubs and local enterprises) started the process to obtain recognition from the Council of Europe of its work in in the area of the heritage co-district ACT (Alessandrino- Centocelle-Torrespaccata) to create value around the Centocelle archaeological and cultural heritage as a “heritage community” (pursuant to the Faro Convention, 2005).
The organised meetings and created documents provided the perfect occasion to show all the activities that the community has developed for the valorization of the heritage district and the inclusion of different narratives in the cultural values.
FARO HERITAGE WALKS
As part of the Faro Convention Network, the CO-Roma coalition took part to the annual Council of Europe initiative of the European Heritage Days organizing Heritage Walks on 21-22 September. Participants discovered some key locations of the co-district. Not only local communities but also some European actors (such as Eutropian and the European Cultural Foundation) took part in the walks. The walks started from the urban garden “Isola San Felice”, a green space taken up for adoption and managed by 100eacapo APS Association. This area has a strong social value for the community, it is in fact the first micro-regeneration activity carried out together with LabGov and National Agency for research on renewable energies and sustainable development, ENEA.
The next stop was at the Osteria di Centocelle following for the Tower of San Giovanni also known as “Torre di Centocelle”, from which the group continued to the so-called “Parco della Cultura” and “the vegetable garden of collaboration” hosted by the Rugantino library in Torre Spaccata. These vegetable gardens have been important instruments of involvement and awareness at local level. Passing through the Alessandrino waterworks, another historical monument that crosses the Co-District, the walk then stopped at Fusolab 2.0, an important space for social gathering, training and innovation.
The common thread of the walks was to tell through visiting the Co-District key places the work done so far by the community and the great potential that characterizes those areas, both from a social, economic environmental and cultural point of view.
THE FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF “COOPERACTIVA”
On December 2018 the community of the Co-District, including the Alessandrino, Centocelle and Torre Spaccata districts, formalized and formalized the establishment of a neighborhood cooperative “CooperACTiva”. The community that for years actively worked in the area and that 3 years ago as part of the Co-Roma coalition had joined forces for a common interest, giving life to a shared path of activism and entrepreneurship. The goal that pushed urban cooperators to set up this collective urban enterprise was to create jobs for the inhabitants of the area through activities related to sustainable tourism, culture and neighbourhood services (including digital).
This cooperative is the first in Italy to be born in a complex urban area, characterized by low human development rates and high poverty indices. This tool represents a model of social aggregation capable of building responses shared by citizens to collective needs, as well as an instrument of cohesion of the community itself. It is a shared, participatory project that enhances and strengthens relational capital, community heritage, active citizenship in the management of urban common goods, and networking the resources of the territory through a democratic and intergenerational entrepreneurial tool. The cooperative became part of the Co-Roma coalition of stakeholders.
DESIGNING THE LOCAL ACTION PLANS
The co-design process aimed to define together with the local community the activities to insert in the Local Action Plan of the project, which was to serve as a guidance of the work for the upcoming 3 years. The co-design aimed to build the activities in a way that they meet the interest and need of the locals, empowering the community in developing them. The co-design activities allowed to increase the ownership of the citizens and ensure that the scope and the goal of the activities were aligned with the interests of the territory.
CO-ROMA CAPACITY BUILDING: RE-STARTING FROM NEIGHBORHOOD COOPERATION
In the immediate aftermath of the lockdown measures’ ease, the Luiss team kept the Lab activities alive and rearranged and adapted the program of the Lab Capacity building as a digital process. The Digital Capacity Building process was offered in collaboration with Confcooperative, the national level organization representative of cooperatives, and the National Agency for research on renewable energies and sustainable development, ENEA (the same organization that supported the initial fieldwork that led the Luiss team to create the Co-Rome coalition in 2015).
The aim of the process is to foster the birth of cooperative businesses that operate at the neighbourhood level and offer services that respond to the emerging needs of inhabitants of distressed city neighbourhoods, as well as to the existing needs that are exacerbated by the post-pandemic scenario.
The overall goal of the process was to (re)discover neighbourhood co-operators who can contribute to the implementation of such businesses, already active or in progress in other city districts and generate new forms of urban co-operativism (in fact, during the pandemic communities have rediscovered the importance of neighbourhood, proximity, and of places where they live and that surround them).
EUROPEAN HERITAGE DAYS: GUIDED TOURS EXPLORING THE AGRO ROMANO
Within the framework of the European Heritage Days 2020 and the activities of the Rome CHL, CooperACTiva, Co-Roma representatives together with the community of the co-district “Alessandrino-Centocelle-Torre Spaccata” (ACT) located in South-East Rome, accompanied the participants along an itinerary to discover the cultural heritage of the district, also thanks to the cooperation the Heritage Community for the Public Park of Centocelle (CPPC).
The first Heritage Walk route started from Parco Rugantino and then headed towards Casale di Torre Spaccata, an ancient, abandoned farmhouse built in an area rich in Roman archaeological remains, scattered within Torre Spaccata Great Park (“Pratone di Torre Spaccata”).
Along the route, the last stop led participants to discover the history of the Tower of San Giovanni and its medieval origins.
The itinerary of the second Heritage Walk (postponed to Saturday 10th October due to bad weather) led participants to discover the Archaeological Park of Centocelle and its history.
Starting from the car park in Via Casilina and along a route about 2.3 km long, the events and testimonies of the Park have been narrated to participants: from the rural villas of Roman times that re-emerged during the archaeological excavations carried out between the end of the nineties and the first two thousand, to the “first flight” of Wright on the runway inside the Park. The walk was an excellent opportunity to make known the traditions and events that characterize the area, even to citizens who do not live in the area, handing down its cultural values for the benefit of all participants.
CO-DESIGNING ARTWORKS DURING THE LIVING MEMORY EXHIBITION
Starting from October 2020 were held a series of online workshops on the management of art projects related to visual art organized by Co-Roma, in collaboration with CooperACTiva, with the support of Sarteria, a cultural start-up for the promotion of artistic, historical, environmental, literary and cultural heritage and Luiss-LabGov.City.
The capacity building process was part of the activities of the Rome CHL and aimed at activating digital workshops that are going to lead to the creation and implementation of a shared and co-designed artistic exhibition (Living Memory Exhibition) between artists, experts in the field which will be involved in the various sessions, and the community. During each session, the fundamental phases of the artistic project design and management cycle were shown and experimented with:fundraising, also through digital platforms, projects’ governance, and co-design of a public art work to be created for the exhibition, together with the community.
The capacity building was aimed at co-designing some artistic public artworks to be realized in the Alessandrino-Centocelle-Torre Spaccata (ACT) district and linked to other artistic-creative-cultural activities already planned and ongoing thanks to other projects started in the area.
DESIGNING HERITAGE WALKS AND TOURS
During the spring, the community took action to plan and organize a series of heritage walks for the spring-summer period in order to promote the principles of the Faro Convention, and actively participate in the initiatives of the Faro Community Network. Through the neighbourhood cooperative (CooperACTiva) and its members the Collaboratory designed and scheduled a series of guided tours in the Centocelle Archaeological Park’s. The tours – which started in May 2021 and will be going on until September – were designed to explore different points of cultural interest for different target groups (families, children, other etc.). The developed paths let visitors discover the hidden cultural gems of the Torre Spaccata and Alessandrino districts.
REOPENING: HERITAGE WALKING TOURS IN THE SPRING
The first heritage walks were held in May and continued through the month of June 2021. Both the neighbourhoods’ inhabitants and others of the city of Rome joined. This is all the more important, as in June, trips were still restricted, even between different Italian regions and from abroad. Despite these restrictions – while the number of participants even for outdoor initiatives – the community was able to organize different routes and achieve a high level of participation. In most cases the walks organized were free of charge. The inspirational idea behind the initiatives was to test if and how these experimentations were useful for the neighbourhood cooperative’s business activities in the forthcoming future.
DEVELOPING THE “GIORNATE ACTIVE DEL PATRIMONIO”
While co-creating the Living Memory Exhibition’s communication campaign and the Lab’s Local Action Campaign, several online sessions were held during the spring. Members of the neighbourhood cooperative proposed to coordinate the Collaboratory’s activities with those planned for the 100th anniversary of the Centocelle neighbourhood’s birth (to be celebrated in 2021). They were working on a unitary communication campaign, which would be able to collect the spirit of all the cultural initiatives that will take place during the summer in Centocelle and its nearest neighbourhoods, providing them with a common narrative. Thus, the initiative “Giornate ACTive del Patrimonio” (i.e., “ACTive Heritage Days”) was born with its logo. The latter was conceived to describe it as a process of cultural and artistic production that will echo within the ACT district.
WORK IN PROGRESS: THE LIVING MEMORY EXHIBITION
After a co-design phase completed during the winter 2020, the first artworks to be realized as part of the Living Memory Exhibition activities were planned by the community during the spring. Some of the street artworks that will be part of the ACTive Heritage Days itineraries have been realized in Centocelle between May and June 2021. Another one is due in Torre Spaccata and will be unveiled during the “European Heritage Days”, annually organized by the Council of Europe in September.
PARTECIPARTE: LIVING MEMORY EXHIBITION
The Living Memory Exhibition focused on creating murals. The illustrated map of the neighbourhood was entrusted to the street artist CROMA who was able to reinterpret the area of Centocelle through its people and activities: the bicycle workshop, the yellow train, the drawing of a sheep right where the burned bookstore was, and again the historic streetcar 19, the partisan history, the market, the aggregative spaces, the Roman aqueduct and the C metro. A map without streets but made of stories and symbolic places drawn on an entire wall right at the entrance to the neighbourhood, at the intersection of Via Prenestina and Via Tor de’ Schiavi.
CREATIVE WORKSHOP WITH CHILDREN BY ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO ANTONIO MONTINARO AT TORRE SPACCATA
The workshop’s objective was to define the content and design of the final artwork of the Living Memory Exhibition. The activity was hosted by the Istituto Comprensivo Montinaro in Torre Spaccata and involved its young students. The pivotal points guiding the initiative were based on Elinor Ostrom’s approach on the governance of the commons, the principle of solidarity and civic collaboration referred to in the Italian Constitution in Article 2, the Agenda 2030 goal on sustainable cities and communities (SDG11), and the recognition of heritage communities operated by the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention, the future generations (Art. 9 of the Italian Constitution). However, all these were simplified to fit the needs of the workshop’s participants. The outcome was a calligram depicting the above principles and inspired by the students. The birds depicted are of different species, all, however, are linked by a common thread to the same destiny as the institutional, civic, social, cognitive, and economic actors who must contribute to the sustainable development of the city: flying together to progress toward a future still a harbinger of prosperity for humanity and the planet. This was an important lesson for the children and young people who attend the school and thus are today’s and tomorrow’s inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The birds are constructed through the words of a poem by “Er Pinto,” a street poet whose art has become a recognizable mark of contemporary Rome.
“Tra gli amici e la natura, per le strade in libertà, si vola tutti assieme verso la felicità” (Er Pinto).
WORKSHOP AT THE THEATER OF THE PARISH OF THE ST. BONAVENTURE “GIOVANNI PAOLO II”
The Luiss LabGov team presented the Rome Collaboratories experience to the local network of stakeholders linked by the Parish of the st. Bonaventure “Giovanni Paolo II”. This occasion was instrumental in highlighting the relations established with local anchor institutions such as the School Antonio Montinaro in Torre Spaccata. The Rome Collaboratory supports the School in strengthening the openness of its activities and level of experimentation. Urban experimentation inspired the School during creating its new program “Officinae”, through which students and families will be involved in outdoor activities in the ACT district for engaged and creative learning about local heritage.
The presence of anchor institutions and municipal representatives was a useful reminder about the need for an enabling public sector for the sustainability of local community-based actions.
LAUNCHING THE NEW CO-ROMA PLATFORM
The new release of the Co-Roma platform (https://co-roma.it/), was produced by the OpenHeritage project. It builds on the first functionality, which was already present in the old version of Co-Rome, namely the mapping of projects, resources, and activities that can be defined as cultural, environmental, and cognitive commons in the territory of Rome.
Impact evaluation is also included in the platform, which uses automated questionnaires for ex-ante, in itinere and ex-post evaluation. The evaluation scheme used is the result of the past experience of the Luiss research group / LabGov, and applies a multidimensional impact indicator (Territorial, Local and Urban Impact, Environmental Impact, Socio-economic Impact, Socio-sanitary Impact, Technological and Digital Impact).
NATIONAL WORKSHOP – “PLACES OF CULTURE AS SPACES OF INNOVATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT”
Open and Common Heritage | Cultural places as spaces of Innovation for sustainable and inclusive urban development – Rugantino library, Rome.
The national workshop focused on the potential of the urban commons to produce new values around tangible and intangible heritage.
The workshop explored three main topics:
How to Promote Sustainable Urban Innovation through Culture (a roundtable discussion featuring dialogue between different policymakers and stakeholders to understand how public policies can promote culture from a sustainable development perspective). Reference has been made to policies being implemented in the city of Rome made operational through investments for example related to the PNRR;
Culture as a tool for sustainable and inclusive development;
Public and Private Finance for Sustainable Urban and Cultural Innovation (how investors, both public and private, are contributing and can contribute, to support sustainable urban and cultural innovation projects).
It particularly emphasized cultural heritage, as an enabling tool for the sustainable development of territories, not only through the involvement of local communities but also by offering spaces, skills, tools, and ideas to promote innovation aimed at sustainable development and improving the social and economic conditions of inhabitants and users in vulnerable neighbourhoods. A crucial challenge for cultural heritage studies concerns the investigation of how to direct institutions to widely experiment with different approaches in managing urban commons (Elinor Ostrom – Nobel Prize in Economics in 1990; Co-Cities, Foster & Iaione 2022, MIT Press) in synergy with local actors (the so-called quintuple helix consisting of public, private, cognitive, social, civic actors) to increase their sustainability over time. New strategies such as adaptive reuse projects and innovative legal-organizational tools such as public-private-community partnerships (PPCPs) stimulate public authorities to make their application more widespread and help enable an entrepreneurial spirit already inherent in many local communities. In this framework, the Luiss LabGov research group’s contribution to the European Horizon 2020 project “Open Heritage” is the result of a field experiment that began in 2014 and merged in 2018 through participation in the project itself into a wider European network with the aim of investigating the conditions for activating commons institutions and heritage communities (heritage communities) as a driver for inclusive economic development at the neighbourhood/district level, while regenerating tangible and intangible cultural heritage.
The Municipality of Reggio Emilia is one of the cities that have raised the level of civic collaboration the most in the past decade. It has embraced the principles of the city as a commons and the quintuple helix approach applied to public administration, producing as an outcome the new Regulation on Democracy and Urban and Climate Justice in Reggio Emilia. It is now about to be completed with a new Title, concerning the implementation of collaborative strategies through multi-actor partnerships, called Partnership for sustainable development and innovation, the text of which was discussed at a conference held at Luiss – Guido Carli on February 22.
Keywords
co-city, urban justice, climate justice, Reggio Emilia, multi-actor partnership
Introduction
The Municipality of Reggio Emilia is one of those cities which have given rise to a regulatory practice oriented toward collaborative management of urban development, which has developed locally in Italy as well as in other European and non-European cities[1]. In Italy, in particular, starting with the Bologna experience, and shortly thereafter also Turin, Naples and other cities, this has been done first of all through the regulations on the collaborative management of common goods, which Reggio Emilia already developed in a singular way back in 2015: the idea, in fact, was to replace the administrative districts, eliminated by the law[2], with new infrastructures that would give voice to the neighborhoods.
At the time, this was achieved through “citizenship agreements,” but in 2022, the new Urban and Climate Democracy and Justice Regulation was passed, establishing Neighborhood Councils as a new structure for listening to the local communities. The main outcome is the provision of a co-planning phase, where neighborhood and municipality develop the policies, and a subsequent co-design phase, aimed at implementing the planned policies through Partnerships for Sustainable Development and Innovation.
The European Framework
At the European level, Reggio Emilia – in partnership with Luiss – Guido Carli, and the LabGov research group – is involved in the Horizon 2020 “EUARENAS – Cities as arenas of deliberative democracy”. In particular, it is a pilot city of the European project through the strategy on Neighborhood Councils, applying also the “Tech and the City” approach to urban and climate justice goals.
In developing this strategy, Reggio Emilia made use of the City Science Office, an organizational unit consisting of one employee and industrial PhD students from Luiss Guido Carli University, which serves as a center for research, development and support for the experimentation of innovative public policies; this tool is also part of a European framework, that of the City Science Initiative[3], to which the European network of City Science Offices belongs.
The Regulation on Democracy and Urban and Climate Justice in Reggio Emilia
Also thanks to the aforementioned project path in EUARENAS.EU[4], as mentioned above, and the cooperation among the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, the City Science Office, the Law Department of Luiss Guido Carli and LabGov ETS, the Regulation on Urban and Climate Democracy and Justice in Reggio Emilia[5] was finally approved in September 2022.
Its most relevant and innovative provision is the creation of deliberative citizen assemblies called Neighborhood Councils, which – through a process of co-planning municipal public policies – draw up a document called the Neighborhood Pact, which becomes part of the whole municipality’s urban planning.
It is inspired by the principles of deliberative and collaborative democracy, which also find recognition in the Italian Constitution, and pursues a strategy of participatory administrative planning in order to achieve a sustainable, equitable and inclusive model of urban development, according also to the goals set by the Next Generation EU, the 2021-2027 EU Cohesion Policy, as well as the new Horizon Europe research and innovation program.
The new Title: Partnerships for sustainable development and innovation
In supplementing the aforementioned Regulation, it emerged that the regulatory framework should be completed through the provision of a new Title, concerning a co-design process involving all urban actors – according to the quintuple helix paradigm[6] – and concluding with a mutual assumption of binding rights and obligations[7].
This instrument, which aims to put into practice what was previously designed at the policy level, has been called Partnership for Sustainable Development and Innovation (or Neighborhood Climate Contract if it is entirely focused on climate and environmental issues), which is a multi-actor partnership that is negotiated and, as a result, broad and non-standardized, in order to offer solutions consistent with the policies, the outcomes of which are evaluated in terms of impact.
The drafting and subsequent application of such an innovative document, however, raised questions of the most importance, with regard to the form and the conditions that would justify the adoption of a multi-actor partnership instead of more traditional procedures, the possible implementation tools (of which a toolbox was drawn up) and, above all, the impact dimensions through which the effectiveness of each partner’s action should be assessed.
This led, on February 22, to a seminar at Luiss Guido Carli, entitled “Neighborhood, Common Good: Democracy and Urban and Climate Justice in Reggio Emilia. An integrated public policy to achieve urban co-governance as a function of sustainable urban development,” where some extremely competent authorities on the subject gave their views on the progress of the new part of the Regulation.
Davide Testa
[1] P. Chirulli, C. Iaione (eds.), La Co-città, Napoli, Jovene, 2018; S. R. Foster, C. Iaione (eds.), Co-Cities, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2022.
[6] E. G. Carayannis, T. D. Barth, D. F. J. Campbell, The Quintuple Helix innovation model: global warming as a challenge and driver for innovation, Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, n. 1/2012; C. Iaione, E. De Nictolis, La quintupla elica come approccio alla governance dell’innovazione sociale, in F. Montanari, L. Mizzau (eds.), I luoghi dell’innovazione aperta. Modelli di sviluppo territoriale e inclusione sociale, Torino, Fondazione G. Brodolini, 2016.
[7] C. Iaione, Urban Sustainable Development and Innovation Partnerships, Italian Journal of Public Law, 2/2022.
How can the recognition of the fundamental right to collective action of city inhabitants and local communities foster the sustainable development of cities and urban innovation thereby promoting social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and prosperity?
The volume walks readers through the new, emerging models of urban governance, such as Community Land Trusts, community coops and pacts of collaboration or civic uses, aimed at ensuring a more equitable and sustainable management of both the city as a complex system and some of its specific essential resources such as parks, abandoned or underused buildings, and basic technological infrastructure such as broadband network and local renewable energy production infrastructure such as energy communities. The contribution seeks to tackle the daunting challenges of 21st century urbanism from an equity, inclusivity, and justice perspective. By so doing, it has developed a common framework and understanding of recurrent principles and shared methodological tools employed in different contexts and for multiple urban resources and assets.
The concept of a “co-city” moves from the legal recognition of the right to use, manage, own city assets and infrastructure but calls for a wider range of tools such as innovation policies, new skills of local bureaucracies and new administrative structure, as well as emerging technologies, community-based business models and financing schemes. As a matter of fact, the Co-Cities book adopts an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach to address urban challenges in a more holistic approach. Nonetheless, it is based on very strong theoretical premises rooted in Elinor Ostrom’s work on the governance of the commons and the scholarship on urban commons initiated by scholars such as David Harvey and Stefano Rodotà.
The work is structured into five chapters. The first chapter, “Rethinking a city”, capitalizes on Polycentrism and the Quintuple Helix Approach for approaching governance issues (public, community, civic, knowledge, and private). The second chapter, “Urban Commons”, focuses on Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking studies on natural resources commons as they translate to the city level, and it grounds the theory of the Co-city on the rich literature on urban commons. The third chapter, which reflects a more legal approach and is dubbed “City as a Commons”, discusses some examples of urban public policies that enable collaborative and collective actions between private, civic, knowledge and public actors. The fourth chapter, “Urban Co-governance”, reveals an interaction between urban policies, the main private & public actors and community members to co-create and co-govern urban resources. The fifth chapter enucleates from the previous discussion and presents a case study analysis of the five key institutional design principles of a potential Co-City model in detail: collective governance, enabling State, pooling economies, urban experimentalism, and tech justice. The book ends by presenting challenges that this innovative framework has to face, as well as opportunities for its further development. An empirical appendix is also provided, but for more information on concrete practices, see a previous work here: www.commoning.city
The hope is that the co-cities framework will offer useful insights to cities, civil servants and activists across the globe, despite the contextual differences amongst cities.
Find out more information about the projects here:
Commoning.city
LabGov.City
Stay tuned for next posts. We will go through the book together and with the authors, delving deeper for a better understanding of the Co-cities theory and practice!
🏆 We are honored to announce that the “Co-Cities Book: Innovative Transitions Toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities”, by Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione won the 2023 Association Of American Publishers Prose Award for Architecture and Urban Planning in Social Sciences Category.
The Co-Cities Open Book is the result of years of research and experimentations on the field to investigate new forms of collaborative city-making that are pushing urban areas towards new frontiers of participatory urban governance, inclusive economic growth and social innovation.
This open book has roots in our conceptualization of the ‘City as a Commons,’ the emerging academic field of urban commons studies, and the work developed in 5 years of remarkable urban experimentations in Italy and around the world. Structured around three main pillars, the Co-Cities open book will first provide scholars, practitioners and policy-makers with an overview of the theory and methodology of the Co-City with the “Co-Cities Protocol”.
The open book also presents the “Co-Cities report”, the results of an extensive research project in which we extracted from, and measured the existence of, Co-City design principles in a database of 400+ case studies in 130+ cities around the world. Ultimately, thanks to the Co-cities report we were able to create the first index able to measure how cities are implementing the right to the city through co-governance. Thus, the Co-Cities index serves as a fundamental tool for the international community in order to measure the implementation of some of the objectives that have been set by the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
The last section of the book presents a collection, or annex, of articles of some of the most important researchers and practitioners studying the urban commons. These essays were conceived and offered as part of “The City as a Commons” conference, the first IASC (International Association for the Study of the Commons) conference on urban commons, co-chaired by Christian Iaione and Sheila Foster that took place in Bologna on November 6 and 7, 2015.
